Everyone Will Be Saved

If others are going to hell, I am going with them…
I believe we will all be saved… this awakens my deepest wonder.
~ Kierkegaard

“Apocatastasis ("restoration" or "return") is the teaching that everyone will, in the end, be saved. It looks toward the ultimate reconciliation of good and evil; all creatures endowed with reason, angels and humans, will eventually come to a harmony in God's kingdom. It is based on, among other things, St. Peter's speech in Acts 3.21 ("Christ Jesus who must remain in heaven until the time of the final restoration of all things ") and St. Paul's letter to Timothy in which he says that it is God's will that all men should be saved (1 Timothy 2.4). For Origen, this explicitly included the devil. In effect, apocatastasis denies the final reality of hell, and interprets all Biblical references to the "fires of hell" not as an eternal punishment, but a tool of divine teaching and correction, akin to purgatory. The implication is that hell exists to separate good from evil in the soul.”

~ Orthodoxwiki dot org

Art ~ The Assumption of the Virgin, is a large painting in tempera on wood panel by Francesco Botticini. It was commissioned as the altarpiece for a church in Florence and is now in the National Gallery, London. The disciples gather around Mary's lily-filled tomb with looks of amazement. There are donor portraits of Matteo Palmieri, who commissioned the work, kneeling on the left, and his wife on the right. In Heaven above, surrounded by the nine choirs of angels, Jesus raises his hand in blessing to his kneeling mother. Among the lesser angels around Jesus and Mary are saints. This mixing of saints with angels raised questions about the orthodoxy of the donor Palmieri, and possibly that of the painter Botticini himself.

[The Assumption of Mary into Heaven, according to the beliefs of the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, and parts of Anglicanism, was the bodily taking up of the Virgin Mary into Heaven at the end of her earthly life.]