HistoricalChristian.Faith

Does the reconciliation of “all things” (Colossians 1:20) include the damned?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — the verse’s vocabulary is the strongest card the universalist chain holds outside the keystone: Paul does not say the powers are merely subjected (as in 1 Cor 15) but reconciled, with peace made, over “all things” without a stated remainder — and one does not naturally “make peace with” a foe one means to torment forever. But two features of the text itself pull the other way and are decisive: the verse names only “things in earth” and “things in heaven” and pointedly omits “things under the earth” — the infernal register that the parallel Philippians 2:10 does supply — so the one text that would carry the damned lacks the tier where they would sit; and the same letter (Colossians 2:15) describes the reconciliation of the hostile powers as a pacification by conquest (“triumphing over them”). Read against its own context, the cosmic “reconciliation” is most naturally the ending of the estrangement between the orders — heaven made at peace with earth, angels with men — and the subjugation of the rebel powers, not the salvation of every lost soul. So as an independent proof of universal restoration it does not hold on its best case; it is weaker than 1 Corinthians 15:28. Adduced by Origen and the modern universalists.

Related arguments: the scope of Paul’s “all” — see also Does the Adam–Christ “all” (Romans 5:18) make justification as universal as condemnation? · the keystone Does “that God may be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28) entail universal restoration?

The claim

And, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven.

— Colossians 1:20 (KJV), link. The argument reads the verse as the cosmic counterpart of 1 Corinthians 15:28: the same “all things” (ta panta) that were created “by him, and for him” in v. 16 — thrones, dominions, principalities, powers — are here reconciled back to him through the cross, “whether things in earth, or things in heaven,” with no order of being named as excepted. If a real reconciliation and a real peace reach across the whole of what God made, the argument runs, then nothing rational is left in permanent enmity, and the verse is a second witness to the restitution of all things.

Who advances it

Origen reads the reach of the verse upward as well as down. Expounding it in his tenth homily on Luke, he “boldly ascend[s] to higher things, since the presence of the Lord Jesus and his dispensation profited not only things earthly but also things heavenly… making peace… whether upon the earth or in the heavens” — the cross profits “even the greater ones.”¹ The maximal “all things” then joins his standard chain: the “restitution of all things” of Acts 3:21 and the “all in all” of 1 Corinthians 15:28. In the modern recovery the verse keeps that place: Ilaria Ramelli counts the Pauline reconciliation of “all things” among the biblical pillars of the doctrine, and it recurs in the universalist case as the cosmic-scope companion to the keystone text.²

The evidence for

The vocabulary is reconciliation, not bare subjection. This is the point that lifts the verse above a mere appeal to the word “all.” Where 1 Corinthians 15 speaks of enemies put under his feet — the idiom of conquest — Colossians uses reconcile (apokatallassō) and make peace (eirēnopoieō): relational words that name a restored friendship, not a defeated foe. A creature that remains eternally lost is not, in any ordinary sense, “reconciled” to God or at “peace” with him; so if the peace is real and its object is “all things,” the universalist reading is honouring the register Paul actually chose.

The scope is explicitly cosmic and tied back to creation. The “all things” reconciled in v. 20 are the same “all things” created through and for Christ in vv. 16–17 — “visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers.” The passage frames a single arc: what was made in him is brought back to him. On its face the arc closes over everything it opened on, “whether things in earth, or things in heaven,” and names nothing as falling outside the return.

Early readers took the reach seriously. Even where the verse is turned to other ends, its interpreters grant that the reconciliation spans the created orders. Tertullian, arguing against Marcion, insists the reconciled “all things” are the Creator’s own — “to whom… does He ‘reconcile all things…’ but to Him whom those very things had altogether offended… but to whom they had at last returned?”³ The estranged cosmos returning to its God is the shared premise; the universalist simply presses the “all” to its limit.

Adversarial assessment

The verse omits the one register that would carry the damned. Colossians 1:20 is a two-tier merism — “things in earth” and “things in heaven” — and it conspicuously lacks the third tier, “things under the earth” (ta katachthonia), that Philippians 2:10 supplies (“every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth”).⁴ Paul knew the three-storey formula and did not use it here. The text that universalism most needs to reach the infernal dead is precisely the one that names only the upper two storeys; its “all things” is the reconciliation of the visible and invisible created order, not a roster that includes hell.

In the same letter, reconciling the powers is pacification by conquest. Colossians 2:15 tells how Christ dealt with the hostile spiritual powers: “having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.”⁵ That is the vocabulary of a routed enemy led in a victor’s triumph, not of a friend embraced. So when the same author says in 1:20 that “all things” are reconciled and pacified, the reconciliation of the rebel orders can be exactly this — peace imposed, opposition ended, the powers subdued — without their salvation. “Making peace” can be the peace of a pacified province as readily as the peace of a healed relationship, and 2:15 shows Paul means the former of the powers.

The Fathers read the heavenly reconciliation as angels reconciled to men. When the tradition asked what it could mean to reconcile “things in heaven” — was there war in heaven? — it answered not with the redemption of fallen angels but with the ending of the estrangement between the good angels and humanity. John Chrysostom: “the earth was divided from heaven, the Angels were become enemies to men, through seeing the Lord insulted”; the cross brought man up to them and them down to man, so that “at last they were reconciled with us and rejoice in the salvation of so many.”⁶ Theophylact repeats the reading almost verbatim.⁷ On this exegesis the verse is fully satisfied by a cosmos whose estranged orders are made one in Christ — heaven at peace with a redeemed earth — with not one lost soul brought back. The “enemies” reconciled are the alienated friends, not the finally damned.

“All things” is order-language and need not distribute over every rebel person. The neuter ta panta of vv. 16–20 is the language of the cosmic order and its powers, and a reconciliation of the cosmos — the whole structure of things set right under its head — is a claim about the restoration of order, not a headcount guaranteeing that every individual within it is saved. Colossians 1:20 asserts the reconciliation of all things; it does not, on its own, settle whether that reconciliation is by the salvation of each or by the pacification of the rebel and the gathering-in of the willing.

Assessment

weak. Colossians 1:20 is the best of the wider “all”-chain because it trades in reconciliation and peace rather than the martial subjection of 1 Corinthians 15, and that warmer vocabulary genuinely resists a reading on which the “all” are merely crushed. But the verse cannot bear the weight of an independent proof of universal salvation. It names only two storeys of the cosmos and drops the very one — “things under the earth” — where the damned would be found; and its own letter, four verses into the next chapter, shows Paul describing the reconciliation of the hostile powers as a triumph over a routed enemy (2:15), so “making peace…whether things in earth, or things in heaven” is at least as naturally the pacification of the estranged and rebel orders — the reading the Fathers gave it — as the restoration of every soul. The reconciliation it proclaims is real and cosmic; that its scope reaches the finally lost is the very thing in question, and the text’s own inventory and its author’s own “triumphing over them” tell against it. So the verse strengthens the mood of the case without adding an independent proof: it is a weaker witness than the keystone, and the register in which proponents press it as decisive for the damned overreaches what the text delivers.

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