Does universal salvation negate the sacrifice of the religious martyr?

On one hand, I feel silly talking about martyrdom. I can hardly imagine what kind of experience martyrs have. It’s almost unthinkably heavy.

But on the other hand, that so many bystanders (even thoughtful ones) reflexively answer "Yes" to the question in the title above disturbs me enough that I want to answer this clearly.

The story goes that if everyone is ultimately saved, martyrdom loses some (even all) of its meaning. If heaven is guaranteed, why endure torture or death for the sake of faith? Doesn't universalism flatten the stakes? Wouldn't the choice to be martyred become pointless? Even stupid?

No. The opposite is true.

If martyrdom is bound up with fear of hell and a hope of heavenly reward – if there is any element of wager – then it risks becoming a self-serving act. Not pure sacrifice, but a transaction. "If I stay faithful under persecution, I win eternal bliss. If I deny, I lose everything."

Now, this dynamic wouldn’t make every martyr selfish, of course. It only risks martyrdom becoming a self-serving choice. A non-universalist martyr might still die for love of God and not out of any sense of fear. But it introduces a subtle incentive structure that complicates the purity of the act (especially insofar as we cannot know the mind of another person).

On the other hand, martyrdom in a universalist paradigm – where one believes that God's mercy ultimately reaches all – entails no such wager (aside from the wager in the existence of God). There's no fear of eternal damnation. The martyr isn't dying to escape hell, but to remain faithful – that's it. The martyr dies rather than deny something that is good and true.

That's a purer embrace of the truth and a more credible "witness" before others – one that speaks to the fact of things as they are (the truth about the world) and not simply about one's own psychological fortitude before some kind of wager about “eternal destiny.”

This doesn't make universalist martyrs "better." But it does mean that universalism does not cheapen martyrdom. In fact, it strips the choice of (some) ulterior motive and makes the act almost certainly more significant.

(Of course, this all applies to the act and life of faith, generally – not only martyrdom. But martyrdom condenses the act of faith into a single decision and puts it all in sharper relief.)

I shared this thought with someone who, in response, suggested that universal salvation does not necessarily entail the elimination of purgative experiences, and so a religious martyr who believes that God will ultimately save all people still stands to gain some kind of “reward” for their act of self-sacrifice (say, a shorter stay in purgatory). In this way, there remains in their calculus some possible measure of self-orientation. But this does not diminish the sacrifice of a universalist religious martyr compared to that of a non-universalist religious martyr. Neither does it have anything to do with my initial question (whether universal salvation would negate the sacrifice of the religious martyr).

This same person suggested that the opposite of purgation is reward for one’s good deeds. So even if all are ultimately saved, then sacrificing one’s life might yield some kind of special or higher reward. In this scenario, there is also an incentive for selfishness inherent in the decision to become a martyr.

That seems obviously true, but it brings to mind this scenario, for me, which seems to be the highest and weightiest possible sacrifice one might make:

To die as a martyr with no expectation of reward and with full confidence that one’s own eternal destiny, as it were, is the same as those of any and every other person.

This is the ultimate sacrifice, is it not? The only perfect witness to the truth for which one decides to die rather than deny. And, as I said above, given that this exaggerated thought experiment has real proxy and life in the day-to-day experience of those who make sacrifices on behalf of their faith (even if not one unto death), then a belief in the ultimate salvation of all people is the most fertile possible ground for acts of pure and unadulterated self-giving love.

After all, God shows his love for us (which is perfect) in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. God gains nothing because God lacks nothing. But God suffers nevertheless to make witness to the truth, which is love, and only love, without reserve or reward.

Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed. This is the achievement, the "work" of faith: to recognize this absolute prius, which nothing else can surpass; to believe that there is such a thing as love, absolute love, and that there is nothing higher or greater than it; to believe against all the evidence of experience ("credere contra fidem" like "sperare contra spem"), against every "rational" concept of God, which thinks of him in terms of impassibility or, at best, totally pure goodness, but not in terms of this inconceivable and senseless act of love.

~Hans Urs von Balthasar