More Kindling for my Heresy Pyre

A reader writes:

Did you see this? Have you ever blogged on this topic? The “dare we hope” stuff is increasingly common, it seems to me. Any thoughts you wish share? Do you know of any good books or essays on the subject?

A brief perusal of Google (which, by the way, is available to my readers [hint, hint]) informs me that I touched on this matter here. Basically, I think von Balthasar makes a reasonable point: we can hope, but we can’t know. The claim to know is simply and verifiably false: we aren’t God. We don’t know the end of the story. So both Calvinism and Universalism are false claims of knowledge because (like the twin sins of despair and presumption) they assert that we know the end of story when we do not in fact know it. Calvinism says, with certitude, “Some will certainly be damned.” Universalism says “All will certainly be saved.” What is left when you eliminate those twin sins is hope. And in our tradition, we are asked (repeatedly) in the liturgy to pray for all in the hope that they will be saved.

The reason this strikes so many as dangerous and heretical is, I think, because we tend to give in to the tidal pull of the assumption that “hope” really means “certitude” or “knowledge”. It don’t mean that.