A comrade of mine, Chad McIntosh, reports this attempt from theologian Michael Murray to try to incorporate the affirmation of apparently universalistic passages at face value while still disaffirming universal salvation.
(Edited to correct: unlike later, at this point I had misunderstood MM to be attempting this which Chad was reporting. In fact, Chad was speculating about picking up and deploying MM’s arguments about the Image of God in humans, in order to see if they could be used to accept UR scripture passages at face value yet in a non-UR way. Unfortunately, later I still composed a rather sloppy description which easily looked like I was claiming the same thing–to which I have also added a clarification. See also Chad’s corrective comment below.)
appearedtoblogly.wordpress.com/2 … ace-value/
It’s slightly more sophisticated than it sounds. 
But I have problems.
The first two that came to mind:
1.) MM’s approach treats the imago Dei as though it is some kind of static feature of the person which exists on its own (after having been created) without continuing active upkeep by God (somewhat similar to Nature as a whole in minimal or even nominal deism proposals). If the human damages it, God has nothing He can do about that; if the imago is repaired, God presumably has nothing to do with that, either–God is tacitly excluded from salvation of the spirit entirely, as well as from being anything more than a ‘legally’ rightful lord of the created spirit.
If the imago Dei does not exist independently of God after creation, however, but continues to depend on God for its existence at any point, then while the free will granted to the person may damage the imago in rebellion God always retains a foothold. He brought the imago Dei into existence, and no doubt can take it out of existence again, but God always has the final say as to how far the imago may be destroyed, just as God always has the first and foremost say in the salvation of the imago from the corruption of rebellion. Obviously, being a bodiless spirit (so far as this natural reality is concerned anyway) makes no inherent difference at all in the possibilities of this: otherwise angels would not have fallen, and unfallen angels would not be fit for companionship with God!
MM’s account, so far as reported, rather ignores unfallen non-human persons as part of the overall data, restricting the scope of his account to human persons and to fallen non-human persons. But then, that would dovetail with:
2.) MM has overly restricted the scope of the accounts of salvation of sinners from sin. While some scriptures indicating universal salvation from sin only speak of human persons, others (especially in context with OT references) speak of all created persons coming out of their rebellion to be loyal to God without distinguishing between human and non-human persons–and sometimes even explicitly including reference to non-human rebels. While some of those are obscure, others are pretty well known: I have difficulty believing Michael Murray is not including Colossians 1 in his account of face-value universalism scriptures, for example, but his theory (as reported) shows no sign of taking Paul’s emphatic emphases about the scope of reconciliation to God (“all things I say, whether in the heavens or on the earth!” for example) at anything like face value. (Admittedly, Col 1 doesn’t strictly affirm that God will succeed at reconciling all created persons who need reconciliation to Himself, whether visible or invisible, whether in the heavens or on the earth, whether thrones or powers or principalities, etc. But the scope of God’s action doesn’t fit MM’s theory.)
