Tag Archives: free will

Restitutio Omnium, Part 4: But What About…

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If over the course of the first 3 parts of this series I’ve in any way obscured rather than clarified my thesis, let me here explain it… No, there is too much; let me sum up: I believe—through Scripture, tradition, and reason—that because God is all-Good, all-Knowing, and all-Loving, he, though he allows evil for a time in his Creation, will defeat all evil and save all creatures. He necessarily wants to save all because he loves all, knows how to save all because he knows all, and has the power to save all because he is ‘all-mighty.’ He will do this without violating any rational creature’s free will because free will, by nature, is teleological—always looking for the ultimate Good (who is God)—and will, by God, eventually be liberated from whatever ignorance, error, or pathology that might keep it from recognizing and turning to the loving Maker of all. Again, reason emphatically leads to this conclusion, but Scripture and tradition also support it, though with language ambiguous enough to allow others to reach different conclusions and present objections to this thesis of universal restoration. I now want to address some of those objections head-on.

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Restitutio Omnium, Part 2: The Freeing of Free Will

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In part 1 of this series, I highlighted how the problem of evil is probably the single greatest challenge to the idea that the Creator of all things could be (as Christians would have it) simultaneously all-knowing (omniscient), all-powerful (omnipotent), and all-good (omnibenevolent). The only solution to God allowing evil in this world at all is that he must have plans to not only conquer all evil, but to transform it into a good which, by comparison, is inconceivably better than the evil was bad. And crucially, this he would do in a total way, for all things, rescuing and restoring and redeeming and recreating everything (restitutio omnium) which had been touched by evil, or else one or all of his “omni” characteristics would be false. According to the logic of the very nature of God, he would want to save all because he loves all, would know how to save all because he knows all, and would have the power to save all because he is ‘all-mighty.’ After all, what could stop the power of God?

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Restitutio Omnium, Part 1: The Logic of the “Omnis”

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“And the gates of that city shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there.” Apoc. 21:25

“Jesum Christum, quem oportet quidem caelum suscipere usque in tempora restitutionis omnium…” Actus 3:21

When I started this blog fifteen years ago, I had just been getting used to a new concept that, for me, felt like it not only made everything I knew and believed cohere together as never before, but also gave me an almost mystically altered perspective on reality. The idea of everything being part of one huge all-encompassing narrative, a meandering yet structured story, changed the way I thought of history, philosophy, and theology. Since then, in the intervening years, I’ve been growing more and more convinced and convicted about an extremely important aspect of our one world story, and I’ve been wanting to get my thoughts about it written down. My thoughts are of course really other peoples’ thoughts, which I’ve read and listened to and digested and weighed internally against everything else that’s in my mind and heart, and finally assented to and owned, I hope with logic and humility, to make them my own.

The problem of evil in Creation is the most reasonable challenge to Christianity and its doctrine that God is all-Good, all-Knowing, and all-Powerful. If God is each of those, then why do evil things happen and creatures experience pain? No doubt some of the pain we all experience is the result of our own actions—pains which we’ve brought upon ourselves. But not every evil visited upon us is our own doing.

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