STORY OF THE WEEK: What If Everyone Goes to Heaven—and the Bible Backs It Up?

Can God restore everyone without overriding anyone’s freedom? The question at the heart of Christian universalism.

Image by Valentyna Yeltsova on iStock

I remember sitting through the kind of sermon that made you want to give your life to Jesus again, just in case the first time hadn’t taken.

It was a proper hellfire-and-brimstone affair. By the end, you weren’t especially interested in whatever heaven had to offer. You just wanted to be absolutely certain you weren’t going to the other place. An eternity is a long time to spend regretting that you hadn’t put your hand up while everyone’s eyes were closed.

Back then, I had very little patience for Christians who suggested that everyone might eventually end up in heaven. There’s a name for that belief: Christian universalism. Broadly speaking, it’s the conviction that God will ultimately reconcile every person to himself through Jesus, and that nobody will remain lost forever.

I had a name for those Christians, too: heretics.

As far as I was concerned, they’d taken the uncomfortable bits out of Christianity to make it more appealing. Of course everyone would like to believe their friends and family were going to heaven. That didn’t give us permission to rewrite the rules. Besides, if everyone gets there eventually, what’s the point of being good?

At the time, I thought that was a fairly devastating objection. I didn’t stop to consider what it suggested about my reasons for being good, or why I thought loving my neighbour might become a waste of effort if my neighbour and I were both guaranteed a place at God’s table.

These days, I’m considerably more sympathetic to the people I once dismissed. Partly because I’ve started asking different questions about God, but also because some of the passages that have made me reconsider were sitting in my Bible all along.

Where I’m Actually At

Before half of you unsubscribe, I should probably tell you that I’m still not entirely convinced by universalism myself. I might get there one day, but I have questions I haven’t worked out what to do with, which is partly why I’m writing this.

I find the idea that God will eventually restore everyone enormously hopeful. I want it to be true. But wanting something to be true doesn’t settle the question, and the thing I keep coming back to is free will.

I tend to believe that freedom is baked into the universe. God has created a world in which our choices matter, including our capacity to resist love, hurt each other and refuse what might be good for us. If we’re genuinely free to enter a relationship with God, surely we must also be free to decline one. I struggle to see how love could work otherwise.

That leaves me with a question I haven’t quite resolved: if everyone is guaranteed to be reconciled to God eventually, does that mean everyone will freely choose it, or that, at some point, their refusal will be overridden? Those seem like very different things to me.

Of course, a universalist might ask whether anyone who could finally see God clearly would still want to refuse. Perhaps what we reject is a frightening picture of God, or the people who claimed to represent him, or an invitation we were never really free enough to understand. Perhaps God has more patience than we have resistance.

I think that deserves a hearing. I’m just not sure it answers every question I have about our freedom to keep saying no.

So that’s where I’m starting from. I haven’t arrived at a firm conviction, but I can no longer dismiss universalism as wishful thinking from people who don’t take their Bibles seriously. There’s a case to be made, and I want to give it a fair hearing.

So, let’s do that now.

How Many People Does “Everyone” Include?

Imagine a company discovers it has underpaid every employee. Management sends an email promising to reimburse everyone, but payday comes around and only a quarter of the staff get their money. You’d have a few questions about what management understood the word everyone to mean.

That’s roughly the question universalists bring to Romans 5:18. Here, Paul compares Adam, the first human in the Bible’s creation story, with Jesus. Adam’s wrongdoing brought condemnation on everyone; Jesus’ faithful action brings life and a restored relationship with God to everyone.

We’ve generally been happy to accept that the damage includes the whole human family. Universalists ask why we’re less willing to believe the rescue might include the whole human family, too. Wouldn’t that leave Adam doing more damage than Jesus manages to repair?

Of course, you could argue that the rescue is offered to everyone but still has to be accepted. That’s a fair reading, and it’s where my questions about free will come back into the conversation. But it helps explain why someone could read this passage carefully and come away with hope for everyone.

Then there’s Colossians 1:19–20, which describes God working through Jesus to reconcile everything to himself, on earth and in heaven. To reconcile is to repair a broken relationship.

Think of a family that has spent years barely speaking. If someone told you the whole family had finally reconciled, you’d assume the estranged daughter was included. If she was still blocked on everyone’s phones and forbidden from coming to Christmas, you might reasonably ask whether the family had actually made peace.

That’s what gives this passage its force for universalists. If God intends to repair everything, what would it mean for some of his children to remain estranged forever? The verse doesn’t explain how everyone comes home, but I can understand why people hear that possibility in it.

Finally, in 1 Corinthians 15:22–28, Paul describes Jesus bringing life where Adam brought death. He looks ahead to the defeat of every opposing power, with death itself the last enemy to be destroyed.

We know the difference between containing a problem and getting rid of it. If doctors announced that a disease had been eradicated, we wouldn’t expect to discover that millions of people would continue suffering from it forever in a place we couldn’t see. Universalists bring a similar question to Paul’s description: how complete is this victory over death?

I’m aware that a payroll dispute or a family Christmas can’t settle a question like this. Still, I used to read these verses with my mind already made up about who was going to heaven. It hardly occurred to me to ask whether they were saying something bigger than I’d allowed for.

Does God Have a Deadline?

The philosophical case for universalism starts with a question that sounds almost too simple: if God loves everyone, wants to restore everyone and has the power to do it, why would anyone be lost forever?

My objection, as I’ve already mentioned, is that people might refuse. But growing up in church, there was another factor that made the whole thing considerably more stressful. We had a deadline.

You needed to respond tonight because you might not get another chance. You could leave church, get hit by a bus and spend eternity regretting that you hadn’t answered the altar call. Apparently, the roads outside churches were exceptionally dangerous.

Looking back, I recognise the sales technique. Make the consequences of missing out unbearable, then remind people that the offer could expire at any moment. I don’t doubt that many of the preachers using it sincerely believed they were trying to save us. But it’s hard to think carefully about what you believe when someone has just told you that getting it wrong could cost you everything.

What I rarely stopped to ask was why death would be the deadline. If God would welcome someone who turned to him five minutes before they died, what would change five minutes afterwards? Presumably, God would still love them. Would he no longer be able to reach them, or would he no longer be willing?

Think about an estranged adult child. You might have to accept that they don’t want contact with you. You can’t make them answer the phone or invite you into their life. But respecting their refusal doesn’t mean putting an expiry date on your willingness to welcome them home. If they called after twenty years, you wouldn’t tell them the offer had ended at fifteen.

That doesn’t establish that everyone will eventually return to God. It does explain why universalists question whether anyone’s refusal has to become permanent.

They also raise a question about how freely we make that refusal in the first place. Imagine someone turning down a life-saving operation because they’ve become convinced the surgeon wants to kill them. Their decision is real, but it rests on a terrible misunderstanding. Help them discover that the surgeon can be trusted and they might willingly change their mind.

For some people, God is the name an abusive parent used to justify cruelty. For others, he’s the person they were told would torture them forever for being gay, asking questions or growing up in the wrong religion. If that’s the God someone rejects, I’m not sure their rejection tells us much about how they would respond to being loved without cruelty or manipulation.

The universalist argument is that God could eventually help every person see clearly enough to choose him freely. Nobody would have to be dragged into heaven against their will. Their willingness would grow as the fear, confusion and damage that shaped their refusal were dealt with.

I still have questions about whether that would happen for absolutely everyone. People can be extraordinarily stubborn, myself included. But I’m also aware that my imagination tends to run out long before I’ve exhausted what might be possible for God.

For years, the urgency of the deadline kept me from asking any of this. I was too busy making sure I’d responded in time. These days, I want to know why I was so certain that God would ever stop trying to bring someone home.

So Everyone Just Gets Away With It?

This is where I understand the resistance to universalism. It’s one thing to imagine God welcoming your lovely agnostic grandmother into heaven. It’s another to imagine him welcoming the person who abused you, terrorised your family or spent a lifetime making other people miserable. The thought that they might stroll through the gates without ever facing what they did is appalling.

But why would restoration mean that?

Imagine a drunk driver causes a crash that leaves someone with permanent injuries. Even if the injured person eventually chooses to forgive them, that forgiveness doesn’t pay for the wheelchair, give them back their mobility or make the driver safe to get behind the wheel again. There is still damage to address and responsibility to take. A tearful apology won’t do all that work.

If we’re talking about God restoring that driver, surely we’re talking about something far more demanding than waving them through. They would have to face what they did without blaming the extra drink, the wet road or the person who should have seen them coming. They would have to understand that someone else wakes up every morning with the consequences of their decision, and become someone who would no longer make it.

I can imagine that being an excruciating process. Most of us find it difficult enough to admit we were wrong in an argument. Facing the full truth about the suffering we’ve caused, with none of our usual excuses available, hardly sounds like getting away with anything.

And the injured person shouldn’t have to make that process easier. They owe the driver neither immediate forgiveness nor a friendship. Their recovery matters in its own right, and any account of God putting things right has to take their safety and suffering seriously. We can hope that an offender changes without asking their victim to take their word for it or let them back into their life.

That’s the version of universalism I’m willing to consider: one in which God deals with everything we’ve done, including the things we’ve successfully hidden from everyone else. I still have questions about how that works. But a person being healed of their cruelty seems a better outcome than that same person remaining cruel and suffering forever. I can want them held responsible and still hope that, eventually, they become someone who understands why.

Then Why Bother Being Good?

I used to think this was the question universalists couldn’t answer. If everyone ends up in heaven, what’s stopping us from doing whatever we like? Surely you need the possibility of punishment to keep people in line.

But if I found out tomorrow that nobody was going to hell, would I suddenly stop caring about my children? Would I feel free to betray my wife? I can’t imagine looking at the people I love and thinking, “Excellent. I can hurt you now.”

The reasons I want to treat them well would still be there. I love my wife and value her trust. I want my children to feel safe with me, to come to me when something goes wrong and to know I’ll listen. When I let them down, what bothers me is knowing I’ve hurt them. I don’t need to add the possibility of eternal punishment to understand why that matters.

So I’m a little embarrassed by how clever I once thought my objection was. “Why bother being good?” makes it sound as though kindness and honesty are miserable obligations we’d happily abandon if we could avoid the penalty. It also makes the whole question about what happens to me. Never mind the person I’ve hurt; will I get into trouble for it?

Of course, there are times when doing the right thing costs us. Telling the truth can be inconvenient. Keeping a promise can mean giving up something we want. Sometimes we behave selfishly even when we know perfectly well what it will do to someone else. I’m not suggesting that loving people makes every decision easy.

But I’d like to become someone who gives more thought to the person affected than to the punishment I might receive. That seems a worthwhile part of following Jesus, whatever happens after we die.

If universalism turned out to be true, I’d still have apologies to make, promises to keep and people who needed me to put my phone down and listen. I’m struggling to see which of those things would suddenly stop mattering.

I Hope I Was Wrong

When I think back to that sermon, I remember how small my concern had become. There was a whole world of people outside that church, but I was occupied with making sure I’d done whatever was necessary to avoid hell myself. I wanted to know that my prayer had counted and that I could go home safe.

I don’t blame my younger self for that. When someone describes an eternity of suffering and then offers you a way out, you take it. But I wish there had been room to ask whether God’s plans for the rest of humanity might be more generous than we’d been told.

There was a time when I would have considered that hope suspicious. These days, I’m more troubled by how readily I accepted the alternative. If it turns out that God manages to restore every last one of us, I won’t feel cheated by the years I spent trying to follow Jesus. I imagine I’ll be grateful that he turned out to be better at saving people than I gave him credit for.

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So, I’m wondering where you are at with the whole salvation thing? Jump on this poll and leave a comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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