I'm a believer in Universal Reconciliation. According to this doctrine, God will ultimately bring it about that every living creature gets a life that is, in essence, good for them to have lived. I was raised in the Christian tradition and so my universalist beliefs are suitably informed by and steeped in that particular idiom, but they extend to every human person of every religious persuasion, not only will all Christians and Jews be reconciled to God, but so will every Mithraist, Muslim, Jain, Buddhist, and Atheist. Why do I believe that everyone will share in this inevitable fate? I am planning a series of posts to describe my thinking on the matter (when I have time to type them up over my coffee breaks) and this post is the first in the series.
Let me begin with a simple observation: the one who loves another desires to be united with the object of his or her love. We have a vivid picture of this unitive aspect of love in the very act of physical "love-making", where two people are temporally united in one loving act (this is true in my thinking for acts of homosexual as well as heterosexual love-making). The lovers enter into a psycho-physical union wherein each seeks to attend to the needs of the other. The lovers become intimately and deeply bonded to each other via the act, and the union it instantiates. They take up the desires of their partners, and the two in a sense become one.
We can generalize from this picture with respect to our relations with other people who we come love and care for in this life. To love another person is to care about what they care about, it is to make the needs of another person your own needs. To the extent that we love another person, then, it will be impossible for to flourish and to experience joy while they are suffering, or otherwise unable to experience joy.
The doctrines of Eternal Conscious Torment in Hell and of Annihilationism tell us that the majority of humans will suffer one of two eternal fates. They will either be tormented forever, or they will be annihilated (wiped out), for their refusal to accept the Gospel. According to these doctrines, only a select few will remain to enjoy the state of eternal joy and flourishing that we think of as Heaven.
But consider what we have just said about the nature of love and how loving another means taking up the desires of others as your own. And ask yourself, how can it be that these select few could ever be completely happy knowing that their loved ones were being tormented eternally in hell or utterly annihilated? It seems like they could not be happy knowing this. So either God brings it about that they forget their loved ones, or just maybe God reconciles all of the loved ones of these select few, so that none of them is eternally tormented or annihilated, but every one them comes to know joy and flourishing in the hereafter. But bringing the loved ones of these select few to reconciliation would presumably require to in turn reconcile their loved ones, and so on until every human person was reconciled.
This is because ultimately all of human is linked by overlapping chains of social relationships of love and concern such that reconciling any one of us would require reconciling all of us. To put it another way, it is impossible that any one human, with her memory intact could be completely happy so long as even one human soul is being eternally consciously tormented or annihilated. Thus to bring even one of us into that blissful heavenly state, all of us would have to be rescued by the Almighty.
So I believe that if even one person gets a completely happy and joyful afterlife, then we all do.
But not only for this reason, but also because the scripture tells us "God is love", his very being, his essence, is a desire for union with others. How could a god whose being is to desire union help but be reconciled to all others? God knows us all, God remembers us all, and desires union with us all. God's own flourishing depends upon our ultimate happiness and joy. And that is reason to hope that we really will ultimately know happiness.
