Marilyn McCord Adams

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The Revd Canon Prof. Marilyn McCord Adams (born 1943) is an American philosopher of religion, a theologian and a writer on medieval philosophy. Since 1 January 2004 she has been the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University. Before this she was Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor of Historical Theology at Yale University and also taught at UCLA for a number of years. She was ordained priest in the Episcopal Church in the United States of America and is a canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford.

Her work in philosophy has focused on the philosophy of religion, especially the problem of evil, philosophical theology, metaphysics and medieval philosophy. She is an avowed Christian universalist, believing that ultimately all will achieve salvation.

Traditional doctrines of hell err again by supposing either that God does not get what God wants with every human being ("God wills all humans to be saved" by God's antecedent will) or that God deliberately creates some for ruin. To be sure, many human beings have conducted their ante-mortem lives in such a way as to become anti-social persons. Almost none of us dies with all the virtues needed to be fit for heaven. Traditional doctrines of hell suppose that God lacks the will or the patience or the resourcefulness to civilize each and all of us, to rear each and all of us up into the household of God. They conclude that God is left with the option of merely human penal systems--viz., liquidation or quarantine!^[1]

Her husband is the philosopher Robert Merrihew Adams. She has argued for the legitimacy of homosexual as well as heterosexual relationships in Christian ethical theory.