RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Apocatastasis
3. In the Middle Ages.
death, were condemned by the Fourth Lateran Council, in 1215 (Hefele, ut sup., pp. 863, 881). It appears also among the mystics. Jan Ruysbroeck (1293-1381), Johann Tauler (1 300-61 ), and Johann von Goch (d. 1475) are said to have accepted it; but it was rejected by Eckhart (flourished 1300), Suso (1300-65), and their followers (cf. C. Ullmann, Reformers before the Reformation, i., Edinburgh, 1855). Still later it is found as one of the 900 theses which that brilliant scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola proposed to defend in public debate in Rome in 1487, and was thus expressed: " A mortal sin of finite duration is not deserving of eternal but only of temporal punishment." But it was among the theses pronounced heretical by Pope Innocent VIII. in his bull of Aug. 4, 1484; and the debate was never held (cf. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, ed. J. M. Rigg, London, 1890, pp. vii. sqq.).
The Apocatastasis emerged in the Protestant Church of the earliest days. Thus Luther, writing on Aug. 18, 1522, to Hans von Rechen- 4. The Ref- berg, who had asked him if there was ormation. any salvation for those out of Christ at death, states that a belief in the ultimate salvation of all men, and even of the devil and his angels, was held among the sect of Free Spirits in the Netherlands, one of whom was then in Wittenberg. They based it on Ps. lxxvii. 9, 10 and on I Tim. ii. 4. He then proceeds to refute it. Again Luther warns against this belief when writing to the Christians in Antwerp in 1525 (cf. de Wette's ed. of Luther's letters, ii. 453 and iii. 62). The doctrine was held among the Anabaptists. Hans Denk taught it in its extreme form, saying that not only all men, but even the devil and his angels, would ultimately be saved; and another Anabaptist leader, Jacob Kautz (Cucius), in 1527 at Worms put as the fifth of seven articles he propounded for debate: " All that was lost in the first Adam is and will be found more richly restored in the Second Adam, Christ; yea, in Christ shall all men be quickened and blessed forever" (Zwingli, Opera, viii. 77; cf. S. M. Jackson, Selections from Zwingli, p. 148). So, too, Zwingli asserts that it was part of the Anabaptist creed that the devil and all the impious will be blessed (Opera, iii. 435; cf. Jackson, ut sup., p. 256). Indeed, while perhaps not universally accepted by Anabaptists, it was held by so many of the party in Switzerland, Upper Germany, and Alsace that in Article xvii. of the Augsburg Confession are these words: " They [the Lutherans] condemn the Anabaptists, who think that to condemned men and the devils shall be an end of torments." It is, however, not put in the Formula of Concord among the erroneous teachings of the Anabaptists.
Toward the end of the seventeenth century the doctrine of the Apocatastasis again appeared, and ever since it has found numerous defenders.
nmf PlieSt Were Mrs- Jane Lead> of London (1623- "04), Johann Wilhelm Petersen (1649-1727), and the Philadelphian Society which Mrs. Lead tounded. With them the doctrine was established
not only on the Bible, but also on personal revelations. It is noteworthy that Jakob Boehme (1575- 1624), who so greatly influenced them, 5. In Mod- did not teach it (cf . his Beschreibung era Times, der drei Prinzipien gottlichen Wesens; Eng. transl., Concerning the Three Principles of the Divine Essence, London, 1648, chap, xxvii. § 20). There is an elaborate defense of the Apocatastasis by Ludwig Gerhard, Vollstdndiger Lehrbegriff der ewigen Evangelii von der Widerbringung alter Dinge (Hamburg, 1727). The Philadelphians won over the authors of the Berleburg Bibel (1726-42; see Bibles, Annotated, and Bible Summaries); but their chief convert was Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (q.v.; 1702-82), who wove this tenet into his theological system, depending chiefly upon I Cor. xv. and Eph. i. 9-11. It is said that Bengel (1687-1752), the father of modern exegesis, believed in it, but thought it dangerous to teach publicly.
The rationalists of Germany, after the second half of the eighteenth century, commonly and supernaturalists frequently have upon various grounds advocated the Apocatastasis. Thus, Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was pronounced in its favor, deriving his principal arguments from his doctrines of the will and of the atonement, and remarking that the sensitiveness of., conscience in the damned, as revealed in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, shows that they may be better in the next life than in this, and also that if a portion of God's creatures were forever debarred from participation in the redemption of Christ, then there would be an inexplicable dissonance in God's universe. Martensen and Dorner considered the probability that between death and the last judgment there might be a fresh offer of the gospel, but put a rejection and consequent exclusion from salvation among the possibilities. The difficulties of the estate of the " lost " have driven others, as Rothe, Hermann Plitt, and Edward White, to the theory of annihilationism (q.v.). Ritschl thought that such information as the New Testament gives hardly admits of a decision between the theories of endless punishment and complete annihilation. Friedrich Nitzsch considered belief in a final restoration as well founded as the opposite view, and admitted the hypothesis of annihilationism as a third possibility. In America opposition to the orthodox teaching as to the absolute endlessness of conscious suffering after death of those excluded from heaven has led to the formation of the Universalist denomination (see Universalists); and there are many of other religious connections in the United States, England, and other countries who favor the doctrine of an Apocatastasis in more or less modified form. For further discussion consult the histories of Christian doctrine and the works mentioned in the article Universalists. The teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, which is flatly against the doctrine, is presented by J. B. Kraus in Die Apokatastasis der unfreien Kreatur (Regensburg, 1850).
[Many significant facts indicate a relaxing of the traditional rigidity of belief with reference to this subject. There is an unwillingness on the
Apocatastasis Apocrypha