Walls, Fog, and a Hopeful Meadow
My mentor, Len Sweet, wrote an introduction called “Garden, Park, Glen, Meadow” in his book The Church in Emerging Culture. I read this in my masters program (thanks Rick Bartlett). It has stuck with me as one of those forming metaphors. Noting that time changes and Christians change with it, but we change back to our origins. The garden here, is a fenced in enclosure. Something protected and kept safe. It is the protected piece and the piece where nothing changes. Think of it like a walled castle, if that helps (it helps me). The meadow is where I find myself most of the time theologically. A place growing wild and full of new encounters and inspections at every turn. I love the meadow of theology. The “out there” thoughts and interpretations. But I need the garden. I need the castle. Because they are what ground me in my pursuits. Over the years I’ve tried to make a meadow in my garden castle. Walled high with the strength of the creeds to keep my faith grounded. But the meadow allows me to search, brushing my fingers on the wildflowers that I walk through. This essay is written with that heart with the creeds at the forefront.
The creeds were never meant to be the whole house. They were meant to be the walls.
Within those walls (within the confession that there is one God in three persons, that the Son took flesh and truly died and truly rose, that there is a resurrection of the body and a life everlasting still to come) the church has always left room for a kind of thinking the Fathers themselves practiced constantly and that we have mostly forgotten how to do without anxiety. Call it informed theological speculation, if you want a name for it. Not dogma, which binds. Don’t call it private opinion, untethered from the tradition and answerable to nothing. Something between the two: reasoning that takes its data from Scripture, from the ecumenical confession, and from the actual argument of the Fathers, and follows it as far as it honestly goes, without pretending the walls of the house are smaller or more prone to tremble than they are.
I want to walk one such path today. It runs through a distinction most Christians have never heard of, made by a seventh-century monk who paid for his theology with his tongue and his right hand, and it ends at a hope spoken by a dying woman to her grieving brother in the fourth century, a hope the tradition has never been able to fully silence no matter how hard parts of it have tried.
What the Creeds Bind
Say the creed with me, the way we have all month at my church: I believe in God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth. And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord... who was crucified, dead, and buried... the third day he rose again... I believe in the Holy Ghost... the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.
Notice what is confessed, and notice, just as carefully, what is not. The creed binds us to the fact of the resurrection of the body and the fact of life everlasting. It does not specify the final scope of that life. Meaning who, in the end, receives it, through what process, on what timeline, by what means. This is not an oversight. The councils that shaped this language were answering specific Christological and Trinitarian crises, not settling every eschatological question the church would ever ask. The creed draws the walls. Within them, the church has always done real thinking. Not idle speculation, but the serious, scripturally disciplined, patristically grounded work of asking what the confessed facts actually mean, all the way down.
This matters enormously for what follows, because the question I want to ask is not a question the ecumenical creeds forbid. It is a question largely left open inside walls the creeds do bind. That openness is not license for carelessness. It is an invitation to careful work. The question is this: whether every rational creature might, in the end, freely come home to the God it was made for.
Maximus Named the Cracks
In the seventh century, the church fought a Christological battle that sounds, on the surface, almost absurdly technical: did Christ have one will or two? The monothelite position said one: a single, divine-human will, merged into a single operative center. The orthodox position, which Maximus the Confessor defended at the cost of his tongue and his right hand under imperial torture, insisted on two: a fully divine will and a fully human will, united in the one person of Christ without confusion, without division.
But defending two wills in Christ required Maximus to explain something that could easily sound like a contradiction: if Christ has a genuinely human will, and human willing as we experience it is hesitant, divided, prone to choosing badly: wasn't Christ's will exactly the kind of fractured, sin-capable thing ours is? Maximus's answer required him to invent a distinction nobody before him had drawn with this precision, and it is the distinction everything else in this essay depends on. He called it the difference between the natural will “thelema physikon” and the gnomic will “thelema gnomikon.”
The natural will is simply the built-in orientation of a rational nature toward the good. It is not a choice you make. It is what it means to be the kind of creature you are. Every human nature, by virtue of being human, is oriented (desirously, really, not merely theoretically) toward its proper fulfillment, which Maximus, following the whole patristic tradition, understood to be nothing less than God himself. This is not a controversial claim about any one person's piety. It is a claim about what human nature, as such, is for.
The gnomic will is something else entirely, and this is the part I hope I make clear enough for readers. Maximus defines it as the self-chosen impulse and movement of reasoning toward one thing or another. In other words, deliberation. Weighing. Choosing between apparent goods because the real Good is not, in that moment, clearly and unambiguously seen. And here is Maximus's crucial insight: gnomic willing presupposes that a person does not actually know, with full clarity, what they want. It is the will's activity in a condition of obscured vision. You deliberate because you are uncertain. You hesitate because the path is not plain. You choose badly, sometimes, because what looked good in the fog turned out, once the fog cleared, to have been something else.
This is why Christ, in Maximus's careful argument, has a fully human natural will and yet no gnomic will whatsoever. Not because he was less free than we are (Maximus is emphatic on this point) but because he was never, for a single moment, in the condition of obscured vision that makes deliberation necessary. His human will desired, chose, and acted, genuinely and humanly. It simply never wavered, because it never lost sight of the Good it was oriented toward in the first place. To attribute gnomic willing to Christ, Maximus says plainly, would be to make him "a mere man, deliberating as we do, being ignorant and doubting"; and that is what the whole architecture of Chalcedonian Christology refuses.
All Creatures Great and Small
Here is where the Christological argument becomes an anthropological one, and where I think it starts to shine.
If gnomic willing is specifically a symptom of separation (the deliberative fog that arises precisely because a rational creature has lost clear sight of the God its nature was built to desire) then gnomic willing is not the deepest or most permanent fact about any of us. It is not who we fundamentally are. It is a wound. A fracture introduced by the fall, a condition of exile, the fog that settles over a creature cut off from the clarity it was made to live inside. Beneath the fog, unextinguished because it cannot be extinguished without the creature ceasing to be what it is, the natural will keeps orienting toward God the way a compass needle keeps orienting toward magnetic north even when you're lost in the woods and can't read it clearly enough to find your way.
This is not a minor technical point, because it reframes the entire question of what sin actually is, at the deepest level. Sin, on this account, is never the natural will choosing evil as though evil were a genuine rival good, fully equal and opposite to God, and capable of satisfying a rational nature the way God alone can. Sin is the gnomic will, fogged and deliberating, mistaking a lesser and ultimately unsatisfying object for the Good it was actually intended for. The alcoholic reaching for the bottle is not desiring oblivion for its own sake. Some fractured, fogged, gnomically confused part of him is still reaching (badly, destructively, through the wrong object) for the peace, the rest, the fullness that only God actually supplies. The natural will never stopped wanting what it was made to want. It just lost, under the fog, any clear sight of where that want could actually be satisfied.
And if that is true, then the eschatological question becomes genuinely different from how it's usually framed. The usual picture of final judgment imagines two equally coherent, equally final choices sitting side by side forever. Some creatures freely choosing God, others freely and with equal finality choosing something else, as though the two options were symmetrical, equally capable of satisfying a rational nature forever.
Maximus's distinction suggests something else. It suggests that only one of those choices was ever actually coherent with what a rational nature is. The other was always, at some level, confusion. The gnomic will mistaking a shadow for the substance, able to persist only as long as the fog does.
When the Son Burns the Fog Away
Paul writes to the church at Corinth about the end of all things in language that has unsettled careful readers for two thousand years: "Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet... When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all." (1 Corinthians 15:24–28)
That God may be all in all. Every rank of being, every rational creature, finally and completely subject. Not merely conquered, but subjected in the sense Paul means throughout the passage, which is submission that completes rather than submission that merely defeats.
If the gnomic will is, as Maximus argues, a temporary condition rather than a permanent faculty. It being a mode of willing that exists only because of the fog of separation, and not a second, competing orientation built permanently into a rational nature. What follows then in the resurrection, should be understood as the full and final restoration of embodied creaturely life in the unmediated presence of God, that is not merely the removal of death. It is the removal of the fog itself. And a creature whose fog has genuinely, finally lifted does not need to be coerced into choosing the Good. It simply, finally, sees it. The same way you don't need to be persuaded to walk toward water after wandering lost and thirsty in a desert for days. The gnomic will does not get overridden by force in this picture. It gets resolved, the way a question gets resolved when the missing information finally arrives.
Deification, Maximus insists elsewhere, perfects freedom. It does not abolish it. A will that finally sees clearly and freely chooses what it was always, underneath the fog, orienting toward has not had its freedom taken away. It has had its freedom, for the first time, fully realized.
This is not coercion in garments of hope. It is the opposite claim: that coercion was never actually necessary, because the deepest thing in any rational creature was never actually opposed to God in the first place. It is just the fogging of our will.
A Sister who Taught Plainly and My Favorite Theologian
Before Maximus gave this intuition its sharpest technical form, a woman was dying in a small ascetic community in Cappadocia, and her younger brother came to sit with her in his grief, still reeling from the death of their older brother Basil only months before. Gregory of Nyssa wrote down (or perhaps, more honestly, composed in dialogue form as a literary memorial) the conversation that followed, with his sister Macrina cast as the teacher and himself as the doubting student, modeled consciously on Plato's account of Socrates's final conversation before his own death. Whatever the precise literary relationship between what Macrina actually said and how Gregory later shaped it into On the Soul and the Resurrection, the theological voice the dialogue preserves became one of the most influential and most argued-over texts in the entire patristic corpus.
Through Macrina's voice, Gregory writes:
"Those who have parted with evil will be united with Him; and so, as the Apostle says, God will be all in all; for this utterance seems to me plainly to confirm the opinion we have already arrived at, for it means that God will be instead of all other things, and in all."
And the reasoning underneath that confidence rests on the same metaphysical ground Maximus would later formalize. Evil, for Gregory and Macrina, has no substantial being of its own. It is not a rival positive reality, equal and opposite to the Good, capable of permanently claiming a portion of creation as its own territory forever. Evil is privation, or better put, the absence of the good a thing was made to have, not an alternative good a thing can instead permanently possess. Which means a creature purified of evil is not becoming something other than itself. It is becoming, finally and fully, what it actually is. The fog clears. What was always underneath it, the natural will, Maximus would later say, oriented inescapably toward the God who made it, stands revealed.
There is one more voice I need to add to this conversation. Because he is the one who taught me how to hold everything above without overstating it, and I want to name him explicitly, because his method is the scaffolding to mine.
Hans Urs von Balthasar; a theologian so nearly installed as a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church that only his sudden death two days before the consistory prevented it, hardly a man working at the fringes of orthodoxy. He wrote a short, careful, and furiously argued-over book called Dare We Hope "That All Men Be Saved"? And the first thing to understand about that book, because it is the thing almost everyone who hasn't read it gets wrong, is what Balthasar explicitly refuses to say. He does not say all will be saved. He rejects, by name, Origen's apokatastasis (restoration of all things) as a doctrine, it being a settled, certain, dogmatic claim about how the story definitely ends. He insists, repeatedly and almost wearily against his critics, that he has "never spoken of certainty but rather of hope." Every human being, Balthasar is clear, must live with the genuine, uncollapsed possibility of their own damnation. Hell, for Balthasar, is not emptied by definition. It remains, truly, a door creation can walk through.
What he argues instead is something more precise and, I think, more theologically serious than either side of the usual shouting match allows: that Scripture itself contains two sets of texts that are not obviously reconcilable from where we currently stand. One set speaks, truly and without evasion, of judgment, of a narrow way, of some who are lost. The other speaks, with equal scriptural weight, of a God who "desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4), of a Christ in whom "God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things" (Colossians 1:19–20), of grace that, Paul insists, abounds exactly where sin abounded (Romans 5:20). Balthasar's argument is not that one set of texts cancels the other. It is that we are not given, this side of the eschaton, the standpoint from which to resolve the tension into a single confident timeline: and that in the space that tension leaves open, hope, not certainty, is not merely permitted but owed. "Certainty cannot be attained," he writes, "but hope can be justified."
This is, I think, the exact same move the creeds themselves make, applied with rigor to this one question. The creed does not let us assert, as settled fact to be preached from the pulpit, that every rational creature will certainly, in the end, come home. That would overstate the walls of the house. But Balthasar's argument, read alongside Maximus's account of the will and Gregory's confidence in the voice of his dying sister, suggests something the creed does not forbid either: that we are permitted (commanded, even, by the same love that commands us to pray "thy kingdom come" without knowing the hour) to hope with real theological gusto for an outcome we cannot, from here, know with certainty. Not a lazy hope that costs nothing, the kind Balthasar spent half his book distinguishing himself from. A hope disciplined enough to take hell's real possibility seriously, and patient enough to pray and labor as though the Good News were actually, finally, good enough to reach everyone it claims to be for.
David Bentley Hart, writing decades later and with none of Balthasar's caution, would push the argument from permitted hope toward something closer to logical necessity. Arguing that if God is the Good itself, and if rational creatures are, by Maximus's own account, incapable of ultimately and coherently willing anything but the Good they were made for, then ultimate reconciliation is not merely hoped for but entailed by orthodox Trinitarian and Christological commitments already held. John Behr has traced similar ground through the Greek patristic tradition's account of what it actually means for Christ to recapitulate all things in himself. Gerhard Lohfink has approached the same hope from the direction of Scripture's own narrative arc, the long story of a God who keeps widening the circle of who is included rather than narrowing it. These are not identical arguments, and I’m not going to shrink real differences between careful thinkers into a single chorus. But they are kin. They are all, in their own way, asking whether the walls of the house are as narrow as we have been told, or whether the God who built them built them wider and with more possibility than our fear has allowed us to see.
A Complication
I cannot, however, pretend this question is settled, because it isn't, and a piece that would insist otherwise wouldn't deserve to be called informed speculation. It would just be wishful thinking with some patristic footnotes.
In 553, the Fifth Ecumenical Council met in Constantinople, and a set of fifteen anathemas condemning Origen and a cluster of associated doctrines were, at some point in or around the council's proceedings, attached to its acts. One of those anathemas reads: "If anyone supports the monstrous doctrine of apokatastasis, be it anathema."
For centuries, this has been treated by many in the tradition as the final word: ultimate restoration, condemned, full stop, conciliar authority, case closed and no need to revisit.
The actual history is considerably messier than that sentence suggests, and serious historians genuinely disagree about how to scale it. There is real scholarly argument…not merely from ultimate reconciliation sympathizers, but from historians working on the primary sources; about whether these fifteen anathemas were ever formally discussed or ratified by the bishops actually assembled at the council, or whether they were drawn up separately, submitted to a smaller preliminary synod, and only later appended to the council's official acts in a way that gave them the appearance, but not necessarily the full authority, of conciliar authority. This is not a fringe position, but it is also not uncontested; other serious historians hold that the anathemas carried real authority at the time regardless of the precise procedural mechanics, and that the tradition's long reception of them as authoritative is itself significant evidence, whatever the paperwork looked like in 553.
What is clearer, and matters more for the specific question this essay is asking, is what those anathemas actually target. Read them closely and you find a very particular package: the pre-existence of souls before their bodies; a fall from contemplative union with God as the reason bodies and the material world exist at all; the eventual dissolution of distinct bodies, hypostases, and even the material cosmos itself back into an undifferentiated unity; demons restored to their original angelic status in a way that collapses the entire moral architecture of creation. That is a genuinely different and a more extreme claim than the one this essay has been tracing. Which is that embodied, resurrected, still-personal creatures, with their gnomic fog finally lifted, freely and at last desire the God their natures were made for, within the resurrection of the body the creeds already, unambiguously confess.
It is worth noting, and I think it is not a small point, that Gregory of Nyssa himself was never personally named in those anathemas, was never stripped of his sainthood, and continued to be venerated and cited as an authoritative Father (eventually given the title "Father of Fathers") by later councils of the very church that had condemned Origen’s apokatastasis in its more extreme Evagrian form. That reception history does not settle the theological question. But it is real evidence that the tradition itself, in practice, did not simply equate Macrina's hope with the apokatastasis it had anathematized. The line was drawn somewhere. Exactly where remains a live and legitimate scholarly argument, not a closed one.
The Claim I’m Making
The claim I'm making is not certainty and not a doctrine to be preached as settled fact from a pulpit that has made ordination vows to a confession that does not include it. What I am claiming is this: within the walls the creeds actually build, there is a coherent, patristically grounded, metaphysically serious argument (not a sentimental one, not a refusal to take evil seriously, but a careful one) that the deepest thing in any rational creature was never actually capable of permanently, coherently choosing against the God it was made by and for. That what looks like a free and final rejection of God may, in every case, be the gnomic will still fogged, still deliberating, still mistaking a lesser object for the Good it has never actually stopped wanting underneath the confusion. And that the resurrection, which every one of us confesses together, without controversy, may be, among everything else it is, the clearing of that fog.
I do not know, with the kind of certainty the creed asks me to have about the Trinity or the bodily resurrection, that this is how the story ends. I am not asking you to know it either. I am asking whether it is coherent, whether it is grounded, and whether the tradition itself (in Maximus's careful Christology, in Macrina's dying hope, in Gregory's unrevoked sainthood, in Balthasar's hope) has left the door to this question open rather than sealed. Kind of like the empty tomb. And I think it has.
And I think the walls of this house are larger, stranger, stronger, and more hopeful, than we have usually let ourselves imagine… and the meadow may be too, if we dare to hope they are.
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