And yet, a capacity might not be actualized in our lifetime. The wounds of human nature might be healed, but our restored and refurbished nature still must consent to grace, and that happens person by person, individual by individual. And as we know, some consent to grace while others reject it.
What, then, are the soteriological implications of a shared human nature in light of how individuals respond to grace?
Among the church fathers, Gregory of Nyssa is one of those who envisioned the eventual salvation of humanity. Much of this, in my view, was due to how Gregory, as described in this series, viewed human nature as a single whole. And if humanity is a unified whole in which we all participate, it stands to reason that the whole of humanity will be saved. That is to say, given a shared and unified human nature, humanity cannot be saved partially or piecemeal. Humanity doesn't exist in bits and pieces. Consequently, salvation doesn't happen in bits and pieces. Humanity didn't fall into sin as isolated individuals. Thus, the salvation of humanity doesn't rescue isolated individuals. The logic is that humanity is saved as a whole in its ontological entirety. God doesn't save you and me each on our own. God saves us collectively.
But if that is so, how do we deal with the situation described above, where, upon our death, some persons stand in a posture of rejecting and antagonism toward grace?
In his treatise On the Soul and the Resurrection, Gregory describes the afterlife as a purgative journey:
Such I think is the plight of the soul as well when the Divine force, for God's very love of man, drags that which belongs to Him from the ruins of the irrational and material. Not in hatred or revenge for a wicked life, to my thinking, does God bring upon sinners those painful dispensations; He is only claiming and drawing to Himself whatever, to please Him, came into existence...Just as those who refine gold from the dross which it contains not only get this base alloy to melt in the fire, but are obliged to melt the pure gold along with the alloy, and then while this last is being consumed the gold remains, so, while evil is being consumed in the purgatorial fire, the soul that is welded to this evil must inevitably be in the fire too, until the spurious material alloy is consumed and annihilated by this fire...
[It] is not punishment chiefly and principally that the Deity, as Judge, afflicts sinners with; but He operates, as your argument has shown, only to get the good separated from the evil and to attract it into the communion of blessedness...[And] the agony will be measured by the amount of evil there is in each individual...according to the quantity of material will be the longer or shorter time that that agonizing flame will be burning; that is, as long as there is fuel to feed it. In the case of the man who has acquired a heavy weight of material, the consuming fire must necessarily be very searching; but where that which the fire has to feed upon has spread less far, there the penetrating fierceness of the punishment is mitigated, so far as the subject itself, in the amount of its evil, is diminished. In any and every case evil must be removed out of existence, so that, as we said above, the absolutely non-existent should cease to be at all. Since it is not in its nature that evil should exist outside the will, does it not follow that when it shall be that every will rests in God, evil will be reduced to complete annihilation, owing to no receptacle being left for it?
Gregory's vision is that of the complete removal of sin and evil from every human soul. As Gregory describes, "it is not [for] punishment chiefly and principally" that God causes us to undergo this ordeal. The experience of agony does not come from God's "hatred or revenge for a wicked life." Rather, the pain is restorative, "to get the good separated from the evil." And, depending upon the person, the "agony will be measured by the amount of evil in each individual." Some of us will be exposed to this purification "for a longer or shorter time" depending upon the quality of our lives.
Crucially, what God is doing in this process is "claiming and drawing to Himself whatever, to please Him, came into existence." Simply put, if God created it, God will save it. And since God created the whole of humanity, God will save the whole of humanity. We were created as a single, unified whole. So we shall be saved as a single, unified whole.
