I think Web 2.0 is the reason why universalism recently hit its tipping point. There were always people who believed in universal reconciliation, in every denomination. Catholic. Baptist. Pentecostal. Evangelical. Church of Christ. We were in every church. But we were always in the minority. Quiet and closeted. Feeling alone and strange.

But then Web 2.0 hit. And guess what? We found each other. Suddenly we realized we were not alone. Web 2.0 allowed us to “come out” and feel confident we weren’t crazy.

Web 2.0 was the tipping point for universalism. It allowed the minorities within each church to connect with each other and start up a more public conversation.

A lot of what Beck says earlier in the post also resonates with me, in particular when he says:

I think people are generally unprepared for the sheer volume of stuff I think about. If you ask me, in a passing social encounter, what I’ve been thinking about you are asking for a two hour conversation. If you are a regular reader of this blog I expect you know what I’m talking about. But given that I have a modicum of social skills, I don’t inflict two hour discussions on people. So while my friends were interested in what I was thinking about I had too much to say, too much to communicate. I needed another outlet.

“Substitutionary atonement” is commonly presented as involving Jesus suffering something on the cross that is unimaginably beyond any torment ever suffered by any other human being: all the agonies of hell that every human being who ever lived has ever deserved.

But then we read Romans 6:23a:

For the wages of sin is death.

What if what happens to Jesus on the cross is simply this: he dies. Being made sin for us, he suffers the wages of sin: death. Not “death + x” for some infinitely huge value of x – because the wages of sin is not “death plus x” (or x divided by however many billions of humans will ever live), but death.

Then the relationship between baptism, atonement and justification is set out in the first part of Romans 6: baptism unites us with the death of Jesus. Hence Jesus’ death is our death, so the wages of our sin have been paid in and by the death of Jesus that is our death in baptism – and our life now is the resurrected life of Jesus that is also ours through our resurrection in baptism.

This also restores an intimacy to our relationship with Christ in his suffering and death. Conventional portrayals of “penal substitutionary atonement” can leave us with a very abstract view of Jesus’ death – one in which what he undergoes is not “death as we know it”, but something qualititatively different, some super-enhanced form of death that only Jesus can experience. That makes the connection between his death and our death hard to grasp. What’s more, if “what is not assumed is not redeemed”, then for Jesus’ death to be qualititavely different from ours could lead us to doubt whether death as we experience it has truly been assumed and redeemed.

However, if “the wages of sin is death”, and my baptism makes Jesus’ death (not “death + x“, but death) my own death also – the payment of my “wages of sin” – then there is a direct and concrete link between me and Jesus in his death. I don’t have a small share in a huge super-death; rather, I am identified with the single, human death of Jesus. (Which also then helps us understand the assertion that “even if I had been the only person in need of redemption, Jesus would still have gone to the cross for me”.)

To put it another way: what is remarkable about Jesus’ death is not the actual dying, but who is undergoing it. Jesus dies as a human being, and in that sense his death is nothing out of the ordinary. However, as a wholly innocent human being (with no “wages of sin” of his own to pay), and as the incarnate God, his death becomes something to which I can be united through baptism, something which can become my death, so that in turn Jesus’ resurrection life can become my life.

This sets out three “paths” for human existence: the path taken by Christ, and two paths of human existence (“A” and “B”). Each path includes a “rupture” of death and resurrection, judgment and vindication. (Note that these paths should be seen as conceptual rather than simply chronological.)

To the two sides of the first “rupture” – the death and resurrection of Jesus – belong texts such as John 12:31 (where Jesus tells us that his death brings into the present the final judgment of God), 2 Corinthians 5:21 and (on the other side of the rupture) Philippians 2:9.

The second “rupture” is that experienced by the believer in Christ. As Romans 6 teaches, our baptism unites us with Jesus’ death and resurrection. To be justified by faith is to know now the final pronouncement of forgiveness and vindication on account of Christ’s death and resurrection. In other words, our baptism unites us to the first “rupture” (Christ’s death and resurrection) and prefigures/pre-empts the third “rupture” (of final judgment).

The third “rupture” is that of the final judgment. To this belong the stark warnings of judgment such as that found in 2 Thessalonians 1:8-9 and the parable of the sheep and goats.

My suggestion is that this then provides us with a framework for reconciling texts warning of the stark distinction between believers and non-believers with those which appear to promise a wider salvation.

Take a text such as John 3:18:

Those who believe in him are not condemned; but those who do not believe are condemned already, because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.

I suggest that this should be seen as a statement of the present condition of those two groups, as shown towards the middle of the diagram. For the believer, there is the assurance of knowing that our condemnation and judgment lie in the past, in our baptism that unites us to Christ’s death and resurrection. However, for those who do not believe, there is only the present judgment of God and a path leading to the depths of condemnation and judgment.

However, beyond that we see other texts, texts which perhaps tell us that the word of condemnation is not the last word for those who die without faith in Christ. Texts such as 1 Corinthians 15:23-24a (using the NRSV’s marginal reading):

But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then come the rest…

The three paths on my diagram can be seen as corresponding to what is described in this text: Christ the first fruits; those who belong to Christ; “the rest”. Or Romans 11:32:

For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.

Or Philippians 2:10-11:

…so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

And the point is that in each case you can only get to the right-hand side of the rupture by going through the left-hand side: Christ’s resurrection followed his humiliation and death; the resurrection of our justification follows the death of our baptism; and the route to the promise of universal salvation – if that’s what it is – passes through the warnings and experience of divine judgment, so that we cannot preach the latter without the former.

Anyway, those are just a few sketchy thoughts – but they do seem to suggest a way in which the death and resurrection of Jesus, the present justification of Christians and the future judgment – and salvation? – of all can be tied together. I’d be interested to know what people think.

Beck argues that “eternal punishment” in Matthew 25:

…isn’t about a punishment that goes on and on and on. Rather, eternal punishment is a commentary about where the punishment is coming from. Jesus is saying in Matthew 25 that the punishment of the wicked isn’t going to come from this world. All too often The Powers actually reward wickedness on this earth. So the punishment is not coming from earth, it’s coming from heaven. The word eternal here is more about the location of judgment than about the duration of judgment.

Hence Jesus is “engaged in prophetic speech”, warning that “God’s judgment will be poured out upon those who do not care for the poor, naked, sick, imprisoned and hungry”. As such it was “not about a coming Judgment Day”, but rather “a commentary about today, about goings on right now and right here”:

So what is happening in Matthew 25 is that Jesus is allowing us to see today through the lens of eternity. Through Jesus’ parable we are allowed to see how God sees the world. And, as Abraham Heschel writes, “God is raging in the prophet’s words.”

Hence our preaching should follow similar priorities:

This is why the leading edge of gospel proclamation is always going to be a prophetic utterance, a communication of God’s pathos for the here and now, about the Kingdom coming and its collision with the world. Consequently, a universalist can and should scream hellfire and brimstone with the best of them. By doing so you allow the view of eternity to break into this moment.

I think Beck goes a little too far in arguing that we need to preach judgment rather than universal salvation (and in particular the “99%/1%” split to which he refers), and indeed he acknowledges this in the comments. But Beck’s post, like the quote from Jacques Ellul in my previous post, shows the continuing role for judgment even within a universalist framework.

The phrase that comes to mind to describe this is: muscular universalism. A universalism that is a long way from the “sentimental teddy-bear God” which its detractors argue that it preaches.

Indeed, for many Christians, knowing that the word of judgment and wrath is not the final word may liberate them to be able to speak that word more assertively, rather than shrinking back dismayed by the apparent injustice of unending hellfire.

In spite of all the explanations that have been given, I realize that there remains a contradiction between the universal love of God and the passages which describe sins that bring condemnation.

He takes a twofold approach to this, with what he describes as a “hypothesis” advanced “with some trepidation, because I am aware how fragile it is”. First, he suggests that 1 Corinthians 3:10-15 can be extended beyond its immediate context of building up the church to apply also to “the upbuilding of a life, which is finally a person’s work”:

Thus it is a matter of how people construct their lives as work, of how they lead their lives, on the basis of a certain knowledge of God. In the course of life, in acts and works and involvements and words, some build a full and solid life with gold or stone, but others build an empty and, for God, an insignificant life with hay and stubble. Judgment consists of passing the work of this life through fire. In the one case something remains, preserved by God, and we shall see later what becomes of it. In the other case, the work goes up in smoke and nothing is left. These people have lived in vain.

Paul says of those people that they “will be saved, but only as through fire”.

Hence judgment consists first of all in this:

Punishment consists … of the fact that nothing remains. God will not preserve anything of this whole life. It is the bitter realization that one has lived totally in vain. Yet we must be more precise, for no life’s work is ever wholly evil. The most advanced saints are forced to recognize the evil works they do, as we see from a rereading of Augustine’s Confessions, and the worst criminal can have in his life a work of love. Thus God does not either accept or reject the whole of life.

This need for a distinction, even in the best or worst of lives, leads Ellul onto his second key text: Hebrews 4:12-13, on the Word of God as “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword”, which separates not good people from bad, but “what can be retained as righteous before God from what has to be eliminated”:

Is not this exactly the judgment that each of us undergoes? It is not a kind of accounting in which good works are balanced against bad works with a view to the condemnation of the whole being, but of separation, of separation within this being between that which is pleasing to God and which he preserves, and that which is to be destroyed and annihilated because it belongs to the devil and to Satan.

Thus Ellul concludes:

Human beings to whom God has given life and whom he loves do not go into nothingness or hell, but their wicked and diabolical works do, sharing the same fate as their father the devil. We are thus given a fuller picture of judgment. We do not merely see the works of our lives burn up. We first have to undergo this separation between our being and our evil works. The reward will be to learn that some of our works are pleasing to God.

This is my hypothesis regarding the relation between universal salvation and those works of people’s lives that are condemned by God and destroyed. What is destroyed is not God’s creation but a construction of our own.

A final objection to universal salvation is that of the frivolous or worldly person who says: “It is all very easy then. I do not need to bother about it. I can live as I like. I am not under any religious restraints. There is no need for works, as the Protestants have shown. There is not even any need for faith, since even atheists and pagans are saved.”

This kind of talk is the only kind that might bring people into danger of damnation. For it is the talk of those to whom the good news has been fully proclaimed, and they despise it.

There is, after all, more than one way to deny God:

If people refuse to believe in God and in Jesus Christ during a hard and serious struggle, if they wrestle with God as Job did, then the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Jesus knows and understands (“for he knows whereof we are made” – cf. Psalm 103:14), and he finally grants his revelation. But what is not tolerable, what cannot be pardoned, is that when the love of God is known, when the full extent of his grace is understood, this grace should be mocked.

The unacceptable thing is not to be moved by this love when it is known and recognized, not to respond to it, or rather to respond with raillery: “It is all very convenient, we can simply profit from it.” This is the kind of hypocritical talk that makes a game of the truth. It involves a corruption of the very being against which there rings out the terrible warning: “God is not mocked” (Galatians 6:6).

In answering this question, Ellul (see previous post) begins by observing that what people are rejecting may not really be the gospel:

Without question we all know of innumerable cases in which people reject revelation. Swarms are doing so today. But have they any real knowledge of revelation? If I look at countless presentations of the Word of God by the churches, I can say that the churches have presented many ideas and commandments that have nothing whatever to do with God’s revelation. Rejecting these things, human commandments, is not the same as rejecting the truth.

However, this still leaves two questions that need to be answered:

1. “If everyone is saved, what is the difference between Christians and non-Christians?”; and
2. “What good is it for Christians to lead lives that are godly, worthy, honest, moral, etc.?”

As to the second, Ellul asserts that “we must be very firm”:

To lead a virtuous life in order to be saved is completely mistaken from a biblical standpoint. The evangelical view is that I lead a virtuous life because I know that I am saved. It is because grace has been granted to me that I can live an honest life before God. Salvation is not the result of virtue but its origin and source.

That still leaves the first question, however. If universal salvation is assured, then why bother preaching the gospel and seeking to convert non-Christians? Ellul gives three reasons.

First, “it is a matter of communicating knowledge”:

All are saved, but only those who believe the gospel know it. This is no small matter, for people are full of anguish and anxiety and fear, fear of the future and of war and of death. They are delivered up to the pain of a cruel disruption. They are desperate because they have lost their loved ones, or think they have lived in vain, or see the world degraded and nature violated and slowly plundered.

They are doubly crushed because they do not know that they are loved and accompanied and saved and reunited and promised a future of truth, righteousness, and light. Not to know this is the great tragedy of people today. Communicating the gospel is passing on the astonishing news that no matter what happens nothing is lost and we are loved. “Good news is preached to the poor” (Luke 4:18). It is a matter of the poor (all of us!) and of this good news.

Second, passing on the gospel enables those who hear and receive it to “become the servants of God”:

They are given a mission, a vocation. This gospel is to be proclaimed on earth. Believers become the servants of this proclamation. I will repeat what I have often said before, namely, that being a Christian is neither a privilege nor an advantage but a charge and a mission. Those who learn the good news of salvation are under obligation to live a different life, to become “saints” because they are now sanctified, and to make it their task to pass on what they have been given.

The third reason, though, is perhaps the most interesting and original:

The third [reason] is our response to the tragic and anguished question that Jesus poses: “When the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8). There is no guarantee of the permanence or perpetuity of the gospel among us. Jesus gives us the promise that he will be with us to the end of the age (Matt. 28:20), but there may not be anyone with him. There may not be a single Christian, a single bearer of the good news. This is a possibility that the question of Jesus opens up for us, and we cannot treat it lightly.

Again, if we are charged to communicate this gospel, it is also for Jesus, so that he may not have the further sorrow of having done everything but finding no one who believes it or knows it. Thus service out of love for Jesus (the only service that we can render him) ought to constrain us to evangelize all peoples and all classes.

Ellul begins by stating what he believes on this subject:

I am taking up here a basic theme that I have dealt with elsewhere but which is so essential that I have no hesitation in repeating myself. It is the recognition that all people from the beginning of time are saved by God in Jesus Christ, that they have all been recipients of his grace no matter what they have done.

Ellul acknowledges how shocking this sounds:

This is a scandalous proposition. It shocks our spontaneous sense of justice. The guilty ought to be punished. How can Hitler and Stalin be among the saved? The just ought to be recognized as such and the wicked condemned. But in my view this is purely human logic which simply shows that there is no understanding of salvation by grace or of the meaning of the death of Jesus Christ.

One of the most interesting aspects to Ellul’s presentation is his insistence on this as his personal belief rather than as something which can be taught with the certainty of doctrine:

But I want to stress that I am speaking about belief in universal salvation. This is for me a matter of faith. I am not making a dogma or a principle of it. I can say only what I believe, not pretending to teach it doctrinally as the truth.

The cornerstone of Ellul’s belief in universal salvation is the fact that God is love:

[A]fter Jesus Christ we know that God is love. This is the central revelation. How can we conceive of him who is love ceasing to love one of his creatures? How can we think that God can cease to love the creation that he has made in his own image? This would be a contradiction in terms. God cannot cease to be love. If we combine the two theses we see at once that nothing can exist outside God’s love, for God is all in all. It is unthinkable that there should exist a place of suffering, of torment, of the domination of evil, of beings that merely hate since their only function is to torture.

It is astounding that Christian theology should not have seen at a glance how impossible this idea is. Being love, God cannot send to hell the creation which he so loved that he gave his only Son for it. He cannot reject it because it is his creation. This would be to cut off himself.

This is strong stuff. And a lot of sensitive people trip up on this language. They don’t like the crazy, insanely wrathful Old Testament God. Just like they don’t like the God of the New Testament hell.

But these reactions are unnecessary. They are failures to understand the language of the prophets. To help with this, here’s a simple rule:

The more you love, the angrier you get.

The more you love the more upsetting this world will be. The more outraged you’ll be with injustice, senseless violence, exploitation, meanness, and cruelty. The more love, the more wrath.

It may seem paradoxical for a universalist to affirm the wrath of God against injustice and evil, but:

It’s only paradoxical if you’ve not learned the lessons of the prophets. Think about it. Why is God’s wrath so crazily insane? Well, because God loves the most. As his love is infinite so is his wrath. And, given that universalists center their theology on the infinite love of God, we happily embrace the wrath of God. To say “God damn it!” is to say “God is love.”

How can a universalist make such a claim? Beck cites the example of Hosea, where God’s fearsome judgment on “the Whore Israel” suddenly turns round into “the most beautiful love song in the whole of Scripture”. He continues:

When you master the prophetic imagination you know that the final word between God and Israel is love. God’s final word to Israel isn’t “God damn it.” The final word is love.

In the same way, Jesus, “by loving the most”, by sharing fully in the love and therefore the wrath of God, “talked about hell the most” – but that that wasn’t his final word.

Jesus’ final words to humanity on the cross were not “God damn you!” No, his final words were “Father forgive them.” After ripping into the Jewish authorities for the entire Passover week, Jesus’ final words to them were “Father forgive them.”

So the allegation that universalists are promoting an indulgent, teddy-bear God who winks at evil is misjudged:

In short, Christian universalists aren’t skirting or avoiding the hell, wrath, and judgment passages in the bible. We don’t cringe when you mention that Jesus mentioned hell more than anyone else. No, we revel, rejoice and luxuriate in these texts. Why?

It’s simple really. Second verse same as the first.

God is love.

Richard Beck begins by observing how most people see universalism as being about soteriology:

When I say I believe in universalism 99% of the time people think I’m attracted to the position because I have soft heart, soteriologically speaking. I want a happy ending where “everyone gets to go to heaven.” For some reason, it is believed, probably because I’m a theological flower child, I just can’t stomach the Judgment and Sovereignty of God.

However, for Beck the key issue that drives him to universalism is not the problem of hell (soteriology) but the problem of suffering (theodicy):

Universalism, as best I can tell, is the only Christian doctrine that takes the problem of suffering seriously. As evidence for this, just note that when a theologian starts taking suffering seriously he or she starts moving toward universalism. Examples include Jürgen Moltmann, Marilyn McCord Adams, and John Hick. Take suffering seriously and the doctrine soon follows.

He then quotes Moltmann as follows:

The question of theodicy is not a speculative question; it is a critical one. It is the all-embracing eschatological question. It is not purely theoretical, for it cannot be answered with any new theory about the existing world. It is a practical question which will only be answered through experience of the new world in which ‘God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’

Beck’s conclusion then needs to be quoted in full:

Innocent suffering is the open wound of life and the real task of faith and theology is “to make it possible for us to survive, to go on living, with this open wound.”

Now here’s the deal. You either get that, or you don’t.

And if you don’t, well, I’m sure you’re a very nice and devout person.

But you’ll never understand why I believe in universalism.