A Critique of Universalism

This thought occurred to me one day last summer when I was working at camp, strolling through the woods carrying my guitar.  I jotted it down then but never came back to finish writing it.  Finally setting about that task...

The logic of this post is assuming a traditional “heaven-hell” schema of an afterlife (in which I would also include, for my Catholic brethren, a schema which included “purgatory”).  I take it as part of most such theologies that the afterlife is (at least theologically) considered more significant than this life because of its eternal nature (as opposed to the changing, temporal nature of this life).  Such assumptions may not hold in every version of universalism, so this critique is not meant to be definitive by any means.

The critique can be phrased in a question playing on an old saying:  If all roads lead to Rome, then what does it matter which road you take?  Now, to some extent this is exactly the point of universalism- it doesn’t matter which road we take!  But I want to press the logic of that a bit farther.  If it truly doesn’t matter which road we take, then we can attach no objective value to any particular road.  Which then leads to some particularly startling conclusions:  it is no better to be a child abuser than a devout monk, for instance, given this understanding of universalism.  At the end of the day, both will end up in the same place, sharing the same heavenly experience despite having lived radically different lives.

In one sense, this implies significant equality.  Death, which we must all experience, becomes the great equalizer, after which all of our experiences will become the same.  On the other hand, such great equality in effect negates the value of this life.  It turns into a weirdly fatalistic and potentially hedonistic kind of gnosticism which holds the “eternal” life as the most significant and this life as a mere stopping point whose meaning and significance is little to none (so we might as well get as much enjoyment out of it as we can in whatever way we see fit).

The resource to defend against this critique is to limit the scope of universalism, saying something like “all those who make an effort at moral living” or, slightly more narrowly, “all those who make an effort at religious faith” will end up in heaven.  This quasi-universalism (not truly universalism anymore, but something that might be considered an “inclusivism”) is no longer subject to the critique that I have raised, but it might be subject to other critiques.  In particular, it might be plagued by the problem of defining a “threshold”- what qualifies as a worthwhile effort at moral living?  What qualifies as an effort at religious faith?  Once we begin asking those questions we begin very quickly to end up back in the same kinds of arguments which motivated the movement to universalism to begin with- the desire to avoid seemingly arbitrary excluding boundaries.

All this to say, the issue of determining the bounds of salvation is a sticky one no matter what approach you take or position you hold.  

Reflections During Holy Week

For a while I have been wrestling with trying to figure out what salvation is. That seems like such a basic question theologically that I almost don't know that I should admit that I have been asking about it. But I wrestle with what I feel like are two extremes that I see manifested in our culture. The first is the extreme that I heard most frequently in my circles growing up- that salvation is solely spiritual, that it involves a particular answer to the question "what happens when I die?"- that answer being "I go to heaven because I had faith (which has become a very, very vague term) in Jesus." The second extreme is one that I hear railed against on several fronts- most prominently in the "health and prosperity" gospel and the "total sanctification" gospel that is often associated with Wesleyan theology. The problem with this is extreme is that it makes everything immediate, salvation becomes about radically changing my life now in some otherworldly way- heaven becomes the rest of my earthly life beginning right this very instant. I think a large part of the problem that I see with both of these views is that neither takes into account the "already-not yet" manner in which our salvation takes place. Already, salvation is beginning its work in me. But it is not yet completed, and it will not be completed until all things come to their completion.

The already is a lot of what we celebrate this week. This is the week we remember most vividly the work of Jesus Christ on the cross. Yet even the way we often talk about his death, I think, moves towards one of these extremes or the other. Protestants, as part of a reaction against the Catholic Mass, which taught that Jesus was continually being sacrificed for sins in the rite of the Eucharist, are quick to emphasize the "completion" of Christ's work on the cross, especially in light of its substitutionary status. Christ died to forgive our sins and that was done "once and for all." Thus, Zwingli can argue consistently that Lord's supper is just an act of remembrance, not in any way sacramental.

The problem is that I'm not certain either the Catholic theology of the mass or the Protestant theology of "once-for-all" substitutionary atonement really captures the essence of what is going on at the Crucifixion. What has been very interesting for me to realize is that Jesus death on the cross is intentionally connected in all four gospels not with a sin offering or the Day of Atonement offering but with the Passover offering! Passover is not really about the forgiveness of sins, its about the redemption of slaves. Passover is the celebration of God's final act of deliverance to redeem the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt- to set them free and make them his people, a nation of his own possession. Those are themes that are echoed all throughout the New Testament. God, through Christ, establishes a new people for his own possession, and the great act of redemption that brings these people out of their bondage to sin and death is Christ on the Cross. Christ's death is substitutionary, but not in the sense that we typically think of, a sense that is tailored by a desire to portray Christ as replacing the sin offerings of the Old Testament. He is substitutionary in the sense that the Passover lamb was substitutionary for the firstborn of Israel who were spared in the plague. They should have been killed with the firstborn of Egypt, but they were redeemed and bought back by the blood of a sacrificial lamb. So likewise we who are in bondage to sin and death should perish with sin and death as they are conquered and destroyed by God. Instead, we are redeemed by the blood of Christ and now we are the free people of God, a people for his own possession. Christ becomes the new Passover, and by conquering sin he makes the sin offerings obsolete.

Understanding the substitution this way makes a great deal of sense with the "already-not yet" scheme of the New Testament. Already, Christ has died on the cross, acting as a substitutionary Passover sacrifice and redeeming us as his people. Already, we are free. Already, God's kingdom is coming to earth. But it is not yet completed. The death blow has been dealt to sin, but the dragon is still writhing around wreaking havoc on this world. We have been set free, but it is difficult to stand up to one who has been master of our lives for so long. There is still a struggle going on, the final battle when the defeated enemy will be destroyed is still to come. That is the tension that we live in and the reality we wrestle with.


And that brings us back to the Eucharist and to the very concept of salvation itself. The Eucharist is not merely a remembrance of our sins forgiven. It is a celebration of our freedom. It is a celebration of the foundation of our faith, the founding of the Church as the People of God. In the same sense that the Passover was a somber but joyous celebration by the Jewish people of their nationhood and their covenant with God, so is the Eucharist for us. Even the name reflects this- Eucharist means "Thanksgiving." We are giving thanks for what Christ has done for us, for our redemption. But we are also remembering that it is not yet fully completed, and in that sense it is also a ceremony of dedication and renewal of our identity as Christ-Followers. It is an embodiment of the "already-not yet" theme of our salvation. Already, we are free. Already, Christ is Risen. Not yet has he returned. Thank you, Lord, for the Cross. Hurry, Lord, and come back to us to make your victory complete.

Deep Thinking In Practical Terms

This post is a little more academic, but I think these are important things to think about.

There are two questions that I have wrestled a lot with lately(lately meaning the last four years in the case of the first question) that I am trying to examine in slightly different lights.

The first question has to do with the nature of "salvation" or the nature of the "gospel." Are these the same things? What are we saved from? Is salvation merely a "pardon" or giving of forgiveness as it seems in many Baptist circles especially. Or is salvation a constant process of taking sacraments and doing good works to become justified in the sight of God, as Catholics seem to think. Is the point of the gospel to get us into heaven or is it to take part in something that is happening here on earth?

These questions are difficult to think through, but I'm trying to put this in a slightly different light. Instead of thinking about these questions in a strictly theoretical and theological perspective where we might debate the merits of each view and its sources of authority, I'm trying to understand the implications of these questions practically. While certainly there is a theoretical aspect to theology and to Christian belief, it seems like Christianity is also intended to be an belief system that is accompanied by a lot of action. So the question I am posing now is "what are the implications for different views on the nature of the gospel/salvation for what we do as Christians?" This is especially pertinent in terms of how we view evangelism. If the gospel is entirely a spiritual message- your sins will be forgiven and you will go live with God in heaven when you die on earth- then our evangelism will be focused on "conversion" and be much more spiritualized. This seems to fit the contemporary Baptist model especially. However, if we view the gospel as a call to participation in God's kingdom on earth (NT Wright is major advocate of this view, for example), then our evangelism will be more focused on calling people to believe in and participate in the work of the church (which will be much more humanitarian and less "spiritual"). So I've really been examining the practical side of this issue more lately and trying to understand how the practical and theoretical influence one-another.

Another related question is an examination of history and how the gospel fits into different historical contexts. For instance, the early church was in a very Jewish context that had at its center the concept of a Messiah. Christianity latched onto that by proclaiming Jesus to be this Messiah. Later, as Christianity expanded into a more Greco-Roman world, it began to adopt the philosophical context of this community by appealing to Perfect-Being Theology especially to explain the nature of God. Most of what we consider the classical theological views of God are taken from Greek philosophy and supported by scripture, rather than the other way around (contrary to the claims of many evangelicals and fundamentalists). As time progressed and the Roman empire fell a more pessimistic and "legal" framework of thinking developed and from that came the theology of Augustine that proclaimed that Christ had paid a certain penalty for our sins, one demanded to "justify" us in the sight of God. And a new view of salvation developed, one in which Christ's work is seen as taking our place and paying our penalty in order to make us perfect in the sight of a God who cannot tolerate imperfection (and yet talks to Moses as a friend, just to give us a hint of where this view, like most, does not completely represent the Biblical data). In other words, Christianity seems to adapt to address different philosophical contexts. In each of these the "tradition" has changed. The question is how does this historical development affect our views today? Should we also adapt to a new philosophical context or do we cling to tradition (a call which ironically seems most strong from fundamentalists who also reject Catholicism's canonization of tradition).

This issue become especially interesting in examining the progression of Protestant thought in the last few hundred years. Protestantism developed as a rejection of a view that had developed in the medieval church to say that by taking the sacraments we somehow obligate God to extend grace to us. I believe the protestants were probably correct in rejecting this theological development in church practice, but Protestants stayed in the same framework of thinking as the medieval church, most adopting views very close to Augustine. However, right on the heals of the Reformation came the Enlightenment, and suddenly the philosophical context of the world changed to being much more optimistic and based around the progress of man's knowledge toward triumph over the forces of the world. In this context, the stories of Christianity seemed outdated and incapable of measuring up to the rigors of academic study. From this context developed Liberalism, which attempted to accommodate Enlightenment thought and in doing so rejected the overwhelming majority of the Christian tradition and formed something radically different from any prior form of Christianity (and for this reason, it seems questionable to consider the more radical forms of Liberalism to be part of Christianity). In response to the extreme measures of Liberalism, Fundamentalism formed which made the opposite error- instead of throwing out tradition they added to it things that had never been essential aspects of the Christian tradition and made them "necessary" to being part of Christianity. Neither view seemed to really address the modernistic social context, and as a result Christianity lost a lot of credibility. Post-modernism seems to pose a similar challenge, but at the same time some very interesting opportunities for Christianity to re-engage the culture meaningfully and address the new context. The question is how this will happen and who will participate? Will more "conservative" Christians shy away for fear of change? Will more liberal Christians throw away theology altogether? Is there some-sort of balance that can be formed to address the culture and still remain essentially Christian?

Is General Revelation Enough?

This is a continuation of the discussion started in the last post, The Meaning of Salvation.

Essentially, I left off that post asking what becomes of those who have not heard the gospel preached. In Christ's parable of the four soils there does not seem to be a suggestion of a group of people who do not receive the word of God. In a way, this makes sense. We could say everyone receives general revelation, which Paul says was enough for them to be accountable for their actions.

I've struggled a long time with the issue of whether it is just or not for God to condemn to hell someone who has never heard the gospel preached. I really can't convince myself that it is just, primarily because I do not look at it as their failing but ours. We were given the command to make disciples of all nations. So when someone doesn't here the gospel, it is because we have not obeyed the command. So how is it just to punish them for our disobedience?

As long as the issue is put in terms of "hearing the gospel," I can't really make sense of that. But when we put it in terms of "general revelation" it makes much more sense. If everyone has in some way or another the "word" of God in the form of general revelation (interesting side note: if John corresponds the word with Jesus and says that through him all else was made, then we can see creation as very related to the word). Therefore, everyone has some knowledge of God and his character and their own sinfulness. This, Paul says, is enough for them to be condemned. This is not dependent on hearing the gospel, it is based on what is common knowledge to all men.

So I become extremely uncomfortable, then, when I hear statements like "no one seeks God on their own unless they have heard the gospel preached." This comes back to the original question- if they have to hear the gospel preached, is it their shortcoming or ours? Is salvation dependent on God or on man? This would seem to suggest that it is dependent on man doing something, in which case we should have all the blame for anyone who dies without hearing, we should have their condemnation.

I think this is another construct of our western culture, another form of the "to have real faith you have to do this" mentality. We assume a human-made ritual must be involved for someone to have a connection with God. In the process, we are limiting God to acting the way we act!

Going back to our parable of the four soils picture: do we have to assume that because someone has not heard the gospel, they are in one of the first three soils? In fact, since the middle two seem to imply a knowledge and response toe the word, if we assume the word is our gospel message, then we are saying they would have to be in the first category (though even that seems shaky, as this category implies at least that the word came to them but was not received). If we say that they are in the first category, we are saying this farmer has just tossed the vast majority of his seed (since in the totality of human history the vast majority of humans have not heard the gospel) onto the road- this does not sound like a productive farmer!

Examining the text again: the parable doesn't specify that the word of God is his specific revelation post-Christ. It simply says "word"- which at the time and in that context, the disciples and people would probably not have associated with the gospel we think of today. The most specific association they may have had would have been the law and the prophets, but they may have even thought in more general terms than that. Paul says that this law is essentially common to all man, that all man knows right from wrong by general revelation, which we already established was associated with the "word" of God. So back to our question- do they have to hear the "gospel" as we know it to be part of the last group?

The Meaning of Salvation

So I didn't get a whole lot of sleep last night. I went to Starbucks on the way back from the 6pm service at Brook Hills. I was trying to avoid drinking something with caffeine in it, so I got some coffee-cake instead. Apparently my plan failed, cause I tossed and turned a lot.

In my half-awake state I pondered a lot of things that I've been examining or learning lately (so if it doesn't make sense now, that may be why, though I've tried to work it out more since I've become more awake). One of those being the nature of salvation.

I think we in the west have missed the point by a long-shot. We say "Justification by faith not works." Then we say "say this prayer and you will be saved." What hypocrisy! A prayer is nothing more than an action, a work. It does not save. Or we say "the prayer or the words don't save you, your belief (often termed "trust") saves you" and then say "but real faith looks like this, this, and this." And we get caught up in the legalism and again forget the faith. The enemy is running circles around us here in the west, and we are arrogantly chasing them.

Undoubtedly, you will live what you believe. But what is it that we were taught to believe?

All throughout the four Gospels we see Jesus teaching forgiveness of sins and the coming of the kingdom of heaven. He taught repentance, but not in the form that we so often see. Usually, when I hear repentance taught, I see it as "avoid these sins" and "do these things" (usually, read your Bible, pray, go to church, listen to Christian music, etc.). That's not at all the impression of Christ's teachings that I see. In fact, that seems to me more reminiscent of the legalism of the Pharisees and teachers of the law, the only people Christ seemed to regularly condemn.

In Galatians, Paul writes a stinging epistle against legalism. He starts off the epistle by reiterating the gospel message in four basic parts- that 1) Christ gave himself as a sacrifice, 2) That sacrifice is to save us from this evil age (variation on this would be sin, I think Paul used this terminology to specifically set up some arguments he makes in Galatians), 3) That this was according to the will of God (God wanted to save us), and 4) It is all for God's glory. The rest of the letter Paul essentially attacks any attempt to add to this gospel with "requirements" you have to complete to be saved.

The impression I have in scripture is that the good news of Christ is forgiveness of sins (built on a Old Testament framework which made the people very aware of just how sinful we are, something else I think we've lost in the West) and repentance in the form of an automatic response. The idea seems to be that when you realize how much you have been forgiven and at how great a price, you cannot help the radical change that occurs. There is no legalism that accompanies it, just a genuine life of forgiveness and benevolence which desires to spread the word of Christ's forgiveness.

Let's think again about the parable of the four soils. We all know that we want to be that fourth group, right? We want to be the ones that, upon receiving the word (and presumably believing it), grow into this bountiful harvest. But let's think about those other three for a minute. Wayne Grudem writes (and for once I agree) that the only sin Christ seems to say is unforgivable is the knowing, willing rejection of the Spirit of God (which seems to drive a steak in some aspects of Calvinism, making Grudem's own doctrinal position all the more interesting, but that's another issue). The first group, the group from which the birds steal the word, seems to perhaps best fit with that. They never make any effort to believe the word, they seem to reject it. We can argue the predestination issues later. Suffice to say, the first group is not who we want to be, obviously.

Where I really want to focus is the middle-two groups. The second group, the ones among the rocks, reminds me a lot of the first problem I said above- that we reduce salvation to a prayer. Sure, they say the prayer, they may be emotionally moved, they may jump up and be ecstatic about their salvation for a bit. But then it withers away and dies. The third group, the ones who get choked out by the thorns, reminds me a lot of the second error we seem to make. They, too, may be excited at first, but as they try and juggle the "fruit" of "real faith" with everything else in life, they get choked out and die.

The interesting thing to me is that both of these groups, in the parable, receive the word and seem to believe it and even start growing. Then it stops, something goes wrong. So my question, and the one I think we all need to ponder, is what happens to them? And second, what happens to the ones who encourage that kind of faith? Another interesting thing to me is that the parable doesn't even mention the ones who never hear the word. They're not even a category. I mean, sure we could extend it to say "well, the farmland that is being sowed is only so big, there is more land out there that we could plant." But I don't think that extension was implied. So that's another thing to ponder.