I used to advocate universalism (the belief that eventually all souls will eventually find immunity in the love of God). I even had a formal debate on the subject with Douglas Wilson. Before I became convinced that such a position is Biblically untenable, I began to become concerned about the following practical consequences that were emerging in the lives and communities of my universalist friends (myself included). I noticed that we
(A) began to de-emphasise the seriousness of the choices we make in this life. In some cases this leads to passivity and moral lethargy.
(B) begin to be so anxious to find proof texts to support universal salvation that we abandoned careful, historically-informed, exegesis.
(C) routinely took scriptures which apply to the age to come on the earth and apply them instead to heaven and hell. A case in point is the many verses promising that all the world will be saved. Universalists frequently take such verses to mean that everyone in hell will also be saved, even though most of these verses are only talking about this world.
(D) begin to elevate our own autonomous understanding of what is good and loving to be on a par with the authority of scripture. In some cases, this even leads to the idea that we can have objective standards of good and evil independent of God.
(E) adopt an us-and-them attitude towards those who do not believe in eternal punishment. In some cases, this has led universalists to say that you cannot truly appreciate the gospel unless you are a universalist.
(F) have a tendency to use universalism as a metanarrative structuring all Biblical themes, and distorting those themes in the process. Being locked into a single issue, we failed to appreciate more relevant Biblical themes.
(G) failed to appreciate the importance of evangelism. In some cases I even heard people explicitly defend this on the grounds that God is going to save all men anyway.
(H) failed to understand the Biblical doctrine of grace, assuming (sometimes unconsciously) that grace is something God owes all human beings. This leads to a failure to understand sin and the human condition which, in turn, has enormous practical and theological implications.
(I) treated the love of God as a static reality that is independent of God's interaction with sinners in this life.
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2 comments:
Interesting. When did you come to your new viewpoint? Knowing your theological inclinations toward Reformed Calvinism, it comes as a bit of a surprise that universalism was able to coexist with sovereign grace. Do you believe that the influence of the Anglican church had something to do with your past pro-universalism spiritual view?
Does this now alter your ecumenical view of Christianity as well?
Universalism occupies that "emotion-ological" space within all of us that wants to see all people together in eternity (or at least our friends and family). However, this is spiritually dangerous - we (humans) have constructed theologies to fulfill our emotional need for post-mortem redemption (Roman Catholic purgatory? Mormon baptisms for the dead? Universalism? Annihilationism?) All of us have had certain friends and relatives who have passed into eternity, and who showed no evidence of a walk with (or a belief in) Christ during their earthly lives. Many of them held a belief, a hope, that if He actually does exist, "the big fella upstairs" would find them acceptable in spite of their sin, weighing them with some kind of cosmic scale, finding them worthy, and thus usher them into heaven. This follows our flawed natural reasoning that we "work" our way into heaven, finding favor with God, and thus we frustrate the true "work" of God's sovereign grace.
I applaud the work of the Holy Spirit in you, Robin, having freed you from one of the subtle theological errors that diminishes our efficacy as Christian witnesses to a lost world.
You may not be surprised to hear that I too espoused Universalism. Everything you described about universalism was entirely true about me. It was quite haunting to read. As if you were reading my journal or something. What turned me around was when I had a switch in my thinking. One day I thought that I was a big fish in a little pond and that being a theologian my job was to innovate and challenge the status quo. I was a solo-scriptura Christian par-excelance. The next day I realized I was a tiny fish in a really big sea. I realized that I wasn't a theologian and even presuming as much was a form of hubris. And even if I was a theologian, my job would be to pass on unchanged what I had received. I could make it relevant to the current state of mission, but correspondence could never change the content of the message. From that moment on I was on a journey backward in time and out of my self-absorption.
Universalism is a subtle error. It is an error you can easily forgive people for because it is a very emotional issue born out of very human sympathy and compassion. But you are absolutely right that is did not stay like that for long. I became intensely arrogant and argumentative. It also led me to think in terms of universal predestination and dismissing the idea of the freedom of the will all together. Good post.
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