A couple questions arise from this. I’ll tackle the easy one first.

Is this inclusion of everyone considered Universalism?

The simple answer is no. The inclusion of all humanity is early church dogma, not universalism.

Universalists (as I understand it) believe everyone goes to heaven and don’t really have a choice. A bad guy dies and wakes up in heaven.

And although it is true that God loves everyone, he also gave us free will. God does not force us to live with him. You have the choice to wallow in your own guilt, fear, and shame.  

But God is merciful and just. You do not get a free pass to do as you will. Remember the story of the field with the weeds? A farmer plants wheat and the enemy sows weeds among the wheat. The weeds are allowed to grow until the harvest, when the angels separate the two and throw the weeds into the fire.

Jesus explains that the field is the world. But what if the field also represents each human heart? What if Solzhenitsyn was right? That the line separating good and evil really does run through each human heart?

The angels must separate out your weeds, because only wheat will get into the Kingdom. Your weeds are separated and thrown into the fire. The fire is not just for “the bad people”, it is for the thoughts of lust and greed, the cruelties and lies of our own lives.

Just like silver, you are purified by this fire. I imagine this purifying process hurts, but that is also justice.

God purifies the world to him, bringing restoration to all.  This restoration is not a free pass.

I must also bring up a great writer with similar views. Very few call him a Universalist. His views, put into story form, are widely accepted. But if another expresses those same views bluntly, he is called a heretic. That man…? C.S. Lewis. Please see his book The Great Divorce.

C.S Lewis is famous for saying all his ideas were borrowed from a disparaged pastor named George Macdonald, who’s greatest Theological contribution may have been his sermon The Consuming Fire.  

Or to quote some other great writers:

In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself. 2 Corintians 5v19

For to this end we toil and strive, because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the

Savior of all people. 1 Timothy 4v10

The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it. Psalm 24v1

And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself (John is quoting Jesus) John 12v32