Is Your Christ Too Small?

"There have been Christian 'universalists' --Christians, that is, who believed that in the end all persons will be saved and joined to God in Christ---since the earliest centuries of the faith. In fact, all the historical evidence suggests that the universalist faction was at it most numerous, at least in relative ratio of believers, in the church's first half millennium. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) referred to such persons as 'misericordes,' "the merciful hearted," an epithet apparently of a censorious ring to it (one, I confess, is quite inaudible to me).

In the early centuries they were not for the most part, an especially eccentric group. They cherished the same Scriptures as other Christians, worshipped in the same basilicas, lived the same sacramental lives. They believed in hell, though not in its eternity; to them hell was the fire of purification...the healing assault of undying divine love." [from: "That All Shall be Saved: Heaven, Hell & Universal Salvation" by David Bentley Hart]

In our time:

Author, Madeline L'Engle was a Christian who attended Episcopal churches and believed in universal salvation, writing that "All will be redeemed in God's fullness of time, all, not just the small portion of the population who have been given the grace to know and accept Christ. All the strayed and stolen sheep. All the little lost ones."