Dare we hope that all men be saved? This is the title of a short book by Hans Urs von Balthasar, and it perhaps asks of us an interesting question during the Jubilee 2025. The book was written in the heat of a polemic, a polemic triggered at least in part by the re-phrasing of the question as one about whether or not anyone will go the Hell. Fr von Balthasar's treatment of the subject is wide ranging, and it should be noted that it is far from suggesting a superficial notion of universal salvation.
To open the discussion in the way that Fr von Balthasar does, we can start by observing that, in living our Christian lives, we stand under the judgement of God, in an existential choosing between the way that leads to life and the way that leads to death, the way that leads to heaven and the way that leads to hell. Scripture offers both a picture of a severe judgement, with the separation of the saints from those condemned to hell, and a picture of hope in the mercy of God. The risk that we face if we insist on a populated hell is that, at least on the part of others, we lose our faith in the work of redemption. The risk that we face if we insist on the mercy of God to the exclusion of the idea of a judgement, at least on our own part, is that we become complacent and fail in our actions to make the choice for the way that leads to heaven. The Christian life involves keeping both of these pictures in view and in balance, one with the other.
In some words of Pope St Gregory I:
Before sinning, let man fear God's justice, but after sinning let him presume on His mercy. And let him not so fear His justice as not to be strengthened by the consolation of hope; not so confident of His mercy as to neglect to apply to his wounds the medicine of adequate penance.
At one point in his book, Fr von Balthasar quote Adrienne von Speyr to a similar effect:
The truth is not simply an either-or: either somebody is in hell or nobody is. Both are partial expressions of the whole truth. Thus, too, Ignatius has a right to make his meditations on hell and to instruct that they be made ... The truth consists in a sum total of partial truths, and each of these partial truths must be wholly expressed, wholly thought out and lived through. We do not arrive at the truth if we only bring out one part and cover up the other. In every perspective, the whole must come to expression.
In a Jubilee Year dedicated to a them of hope, it is a most audacious expression of that hope to ask ourselves the question posed by the title of von Balthasar's book: Dare we hope that all men be saved?
To adapt the words of the Jubilee prayer:
