All Things in Christ

Is hell eternal? The question is old, and this book argues that it is the wrong place to begin.

All Things in Christ starts where the tradition starts: not with what God does, but with who God is. Classical theism, the doctrine of God that runs from the second-century apologists to the Cappadocians, from Augustine to Aquinas, and that the reformers inherited without breaking, holds that God is not one being among beings but Goodness itself: simple, unchanging, with no shadow of cruelty in him. Everything else follows from that.

Seven parts carry the argument. Why Christianity is classical theism, and what happens to the doctrine of God when that is given up. How to read the Scriptures when two sets of texts pull against each other. The cosmic Christ, in whom all things hold together. Christic inclusivism: all salvation is through Christ and through Christ alone, but the grace of Christ is not confined to the visible boundaries of the church. And the greater hope, argued from Gregory of Nyssa, Origen and Maximus the Confessor, and offered as a hope the Christian may hold, not as a dogma the Church has defined.

It does not deny judgment, or the seriousness of sin, or hell as a real possibility of created freedom. It asks whether a door locked from the inside must stay locked forever.

One hundred and twelve short chapters, 222 notes, and five appendices: a glossary of terms, a chronology of the authors, a note on sources, objections with answers, and the central biblical passages set out one by one.

For readers who were taught to fear God before they were taught to trust him.