2026 Mendenhall Lecture: Unwrathing God: Rethinking Hell, Judgment, & Afterlife with Dr. Brad Jersak
The Zeitcast with Jonathan Martin
1,756 views
Few Christian doctrines have shaped the moral imagination more profoundly — or more controversially — than teachings about hell, divine judgment, and the afterlife.
After several years in which the Mendenhall Lecture has explored intersections of faith and culture, this year we turn more directly to a theological theme within the Christian tradition. How people imagine “last things” — judgment, destiny, the future of humanity — has significant implications for ethics, politics, hope, and how communities understand justice and mercy in the present.
In a moment when many experience our world as marked by division, anxiety, and even forms of social “hell,” questions about ultimate justice and restoration feel especially pressing.
In this lecture, theologian and author Dr. Brad Jersak invites us to reconsider what Christians mean when they speak of God’s wrath, final judgment, and eternal destiny. What if divine judgment is not opposed to love, but an expression of it? What if the language of “wrath” has been misunderstood? And what might the "restoration of all things" suggest about how we live now?
Drawing from Scripture, early Christian theology, and contemporary scholarship, Dr. Jersak explores whether the God revealed in Christ is best understood not as retributive, but as restorative.
About the speaker:
Dr. Bradley Jersak is Principal of St. Stephen’s University in New Brunswick and Director of its School of Theology & Culture. After two decades in pastoral ministry, he earned a PhD in Theology from Bangor University (Wales), where his research focused on the political theology of George P. Grant and Simone Weil. He has also served as a visiting scholar at the University of Nottingham, specializing in Patristic Christology.
Dr. Jersak is the author of more than twenty books in theology and philosophy, including Her Gates Will Never Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem, a widely discussed work on hell and Christian hope. His scholarship engages Scripture and the historic Christian tradition while addressing contemporary questions about divine justice, mercy, and restoration.
5 Comments
For our sacred scripture says God desires/wills, depending on which translation one is reading, the salvation of all. And if one does not will/desire the salvation of all, one is actively willing/desiring the opposite of what God wills/desires. It’s that simple.
And why would God desire something He already knows he cannot accomplish? For all things live and move and have their being in God. Nothing has ever been or will ever be outside of God. And God is already fully present to what is for us a trillion years in the future, right now, as God is omnipresent.
For God, and the Christian religion to make any logical sense, universal reconciliation in Christ has to be true.
2026 Mendenhall Lecture: Unwrathing God: Rethinking Hell, Judgment, & Afterlife with Dr. Brad Jersak
The Zeitcast with Jonathan Martin
1,756 views
Few Christian doctrines have shaped the moral imagination more profoundly — or more controversially — than teachings about hell, divine judgment, and the afterlife.
After several years in which the Mendenhall Lecture has explored intersections of faith and culture, this year we turn more directly to a theological theme within the Christian tradition. How people imagine “last things” — judgment, destiny, the future of humanity — has significant implications for ethics, politics, hope, and how communities understand justice and mercy in the present.
In a moment when many experience our world as marked by division, anxiety, and even forms of social “hell,” questions about ultimate justice and restoration feel especially pressing.
In this lecture, theologian and author Dr. Brad Jersak invites us to reconsider what Christians mean when they speak of God’s wrath, final judgment, and eternal destiny. What if divine judgment is not opposed to love, but an expression of it? What if the language of “wrath” has been misunderstood? And what might the "restoration of all things" suggest about how we live now?
Drawing from Scripture, early Christian theology, and contemporary scholarship, Dr. Jersak explores whether the God revealed in Christ is best understood not as retributive, but as restorative.
About the speaker:
Dr. Bradley Jersak is Principal of St. Stephen’s University in New Brunswick and Director of its School of Theology & Culture. After two decades in pastoral ministry, he earned a PhD in Theology from Bangor University (Wales), where his research focused on the political theology of George P. Grant and Simone Weil. He has also served as a visiting scholar at the University of Nottingham, specializing in Patristic Christology.
Dr. Jersak is the author of more than twenty books in theology and philosophy, including Her Gates Will Never Shut: Hope, Hell, and the New Jerusalem, a widely discussed work on hell and Christian hope. His scholarship engages Scripture and the historic Christian tradition while addressing contemporary questions about divine justice, mercy, and restoration.