A good God would never leave humans with a message of non-universal salvation because humans simply cannot be trusted with one.

If God is malevolence and not benevolence none of this matters, of course, but some argue that a good God forever withholds salvation from a lot of us.

The all-too-familiar power plays of Christian history are a collective cautionary tale about what happens when we are certain of an eternal hell for most of us.

We burn heretics and exile anyone our judgments consign to damnation. We divide, we separate, we sort humans, as if we were God because humans behave like the gods we worship.

We dehumanize, demonize, and erase anyone we consider an infidel. Hiroshima and Auschwitz were, after all, the work of ostensibly-baptized nations.

We contemporary American Christian don’t execute heretics but we seem adept at torturing souls and wounding hearts, of banishing and shaming so many, separating persons from our communities under the cloak of some political or cultural notion that is not at the center of gospel trust.

Instead of certainty about the destiny of each human, the tradition gives us something better: radical trust in the God Jesus reveals.

In exchange for the fear that drives so many of the punishments we exact on ourselves and others, we are taught to welcome the judgment of God, who alone can without harm remove the tares from our virtues and harvest the wheat from our vices, who will with sanctifying fire make us the humans he intends us to be.

We are left after all the dust settles—after we listen to and sit with the tradition’s wisest hearts, especially the first Christians, who read the Scriptures as though Jesus Christ is what it means to be God in eternity and in all the times eternity contains—with a God who wants to gift us with permanence.

When perfect love casts out fear, when we trust the God who will judge us when we die, we live lives of radical solidarity with, courageous forgiveness for, all of us. We embody the reconciliation of the world with God.

I see this redeemed and peacemaking disposition in Elder Porphyrios:

“I am not afraid of hell, and I don’t think about paradise. I just ask God to be merciful to the entire world and to myself.”