The Inescapable Love of God

Many think it impossible to square a doctrine of universal reconciliation with the theme of divine judgment that we find not only in Paul, but throughout the Bible generally. For the God of the Bible, they insist, is not only loving and merciful; he is also holy and just. Behind such a claim lies the Augustinian idea that mercy and justice are separate and distinct attributes of God. But where is the biblical warrant, I would ask, for thinking that divine justice requires something that divine mercy does not, or that divine mercy permits something that divine justice does not? At this point, I fear, we sometimes read our own ideas (and philosophical misconceptions) into the Bible. We think that mercy is one attribute and justice another, so we read this into the Bible; we think that God’s love is an attitude of one kind and his wrath an attitude of an opposite kind, so we also read this into the Bible; we think that God punishes for one kind of a reason and forgives for another, and we tend to picture God as a schizophrenic whose justice pushes him in one direction and whose love pushes him in another; so we again read all of this into the Bible. When we turn to St. Paul, however, we encounter a profound and vigorous challenge to this whole way of thinking. Paul expressed his challenge most clearly in the eleventh chapter of Romans, where he explicitly stated that God’s severity towards the disobedient, his judgment of sin, even his willingness to blind the eyes and harden the hearts of the disobedient, are expressions of a more fundamental quality, namely that of mercy, which is itself an expression of his purifying love. 
According to Paul, therefore, God is always and everywhere merciful, but we sometimes experience his mercy (or purifying love) as severity, judgment, punishment. When we live a life of obedience, we experience it as kindness; when we live a life of disobedience, we experience it as severity (see 11: 22). Paul himself called this a mystery (11: 25) and admitted that God’s ways are, in just this respect, “inscrutable” and “unsearchable” (11: 33), but nothing could be clearer than his own glorious summation of the whole thing in 11: 32.  According to Paul, the very ones whom God “shuts up” to disobedience—whom he blinds, or hardens, or cuts off for a season—are those to whom he is merciful. God hardens a heart in order to produce a contrite spirit in the end, blinds those who are unready for the truth in order to bring them ultimately to the truth, “imprisons all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to [them] all.” Now if God is truly merciful to all, as Paul insisted in the eleventh chapter of Romans—if God’s severity towards the disobedient, no less than his kindness towards the obedient, is an expression of his mercy—then we must adjust our understanding of divine punishment accordingly. We must come to appreciate that, according to Paul, God punishes sin for the same reason he sent his Son in the flesh: to redeem or reclaim those who have fallen into sin.