Christmas marks a beginning. The birth of a new day on earth. The hope and salvation of the world was born in a manger in Bethlehem on Christmas morning, and the story of our redemption began.
Over the past several months I have from time to time expressed in my articles here what I understand the Good News of salvation to be. I understand the salvation won for us by Jesus Christ to be universal and without limitation—utter, complete, full and total salvation of all men and women of every race, creed and religion. I believe we will all, in the fullness of time, see the gates of Heaven.
Recently, I have been asked to justify my belief in such a generous salvation. I have been taken to task with Bible verses plucked first from here and then from there, and challenged on questions of scriptural authority and inerrancy. In short, I have been asked to defend my beliefs.
Rather than delivering an apology for Christian Universalism, I will simply explain how I came to hold to such beliefs. I will begin by saying, simply, that God told me so.
Sometimes I think I learned all the important lessons in my life backwards. I don’t mean that I got the content of the lessons turned around in my head… just that I started at the back of the book and read to the front. I didn’t always understand what I was learning until I reached the beginning.
I know this has been true with religion. Many years ago, as a teenager I started with Genesis and read through the books of the Bible, front to back. I came away from that exercise with an impression of a God who both loves people, yet who is willing, in fact determined, to cruelly punish and eternally torment the objects of his love for even the most minor of misdeeds. The picture was frightening, and it made no sense.
Throughout my childhood and teenage years my family regularly attended church, a fundamentalist non-denominational church called, simply, the Church of Christ. There I heard that God is a just God, but I also heard that eternal suffering and torment in a lake of fire is the certain punishment for even minor infractions of God’s law.
There was nothing in between. No nuance, no moderation. Just eternal bliss in Heaven or eternal torment in Hell. That was it, cut and dried.
I remember attending every night of a six-night revival at the El Paso Colosseum when I was sixteen. On the third night I was sitting near the middle in the fourth row from the stage with my brand new girlfriend listening to a dynamic Church of Christ preacher named Jimmy Allen deliver a sermon he called “What is Hell Like?” He made it abundantly clear that Hell was a place I did not want to visit, but one to which I was almost certainly headed if didn’t put the idea of kissing that girl out of my head, and beg forgiveness for entertaining that thought in the first place.
Such a concept of God and Hell takes cruel and unusual punishment to an altogether new level.
My father worked all of his adult life for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, and our family lived in employee housing on federal penitentiary reservations. I knew a lot of federal inmates, and many became my friends. I used to think about the crimes the inmates had committed and the sentences they had received. Apparently, Congress and our courts felt as though three years in prison was sufficient to repay society for transporting stolen property across state lines. Five years was sufficient for most instances of income tax evasion.
Federal sentencing guidelines seemed reasonable. Imminently reasonable compared to those of a God who would burn me to a crisp for kissing that girl. God forbid that I should have lusted after her! Well, actually, he did forbid that and backed it up with the threat of that same lake of fire.
I told my preacher (our church was too fundamentalist to have pastors) that I was having difficulty understanding how God could love us, yet treat us so cavalierly and unjustly. He agreed that it’s all hard to understand, but that I shouldn’t worry too much about it.
We can’t fully understand God’s justice, the preacher explained, because we’re mortals and have limited intellectual capacity. Similarly, we can’t understand God’s love because, well… we just don’t understand things so good. None of us.
We simply need to trust that God loves us, the preacher concluded, and strictly obey every commandment to the letter lest we be victims of this justice we can’t understand.
Nothing felt right about this concept of God or my relationship to Him. Still, it was the concept I was taught, the concept that seemed to be affirmed in the Scriptures as I’d read them, and the only safe bet in what appeared to be a cosmic game of life and death. It was what I learned when I took Christianity from the beginning to end, front to back, from Genesis to Revelation.
In the fall of 1969 I met a wonderful woman, a classical scholar and devout Catholic, from whom I was to learn many things. I asked her one morning how she reconciled the biblical claims of a just God with the many biblical examples of a vengeful and ruthless Deity. Her response was, “Prentice, start with what you know.”
“You know that God has given you the ability to reason, a conscience and a sense of justice,” she said. “Do you suppose he would have given you those gifts if they cannot be trusted?”
What an intriguing question. What a compelling idea.
“He also gave you feelings of compassion and the capacity to love,” she continued. “Is it possible to think that he did not intend for these gifts to inform and guide you?
“God is, himself, within you, informing you constantly in justice, compassion and love. Hear what he tells you… the things he speaks to you. Never limit your understanding of Him to the things others have said or written about him.”
My sense of justice tells me that all things should be in balance. A small offense warrants a small punishment. A greater offense warrants a greater punishment. No punishment should exceed in violence and suffering that associated with the crime itself. Vengeance is not justice.
My reason tells me that all punishments should be corrective. Punishment should fit the crime, and it should be designed to bring about both a change of heart and a change in behavior.
My capacity for compassion and love cause me pain when any should be in need of correction, and fill me with joy when any is released from punishment.
From all this, I arrive at a few simple conclusions. If God is just, compassionate and loving, he will meet out justice with compassion and love. In his court punishment will fit the crime, and all punishments will be corrective and compassionately administered. And, finally, He will welcome with joy and open arms every soul once reproved.
In the end, there must be a happy outcome in the lives of all. It is what justice, compassion and love demand. Nothing less.
None must be sent to Hell for all eternity. None must suffer the Lake of Fire and its torments without end. All must be saved and reconciled to God. In short, reason, justice compassion and love combine to demand that the tenets of Christian Universalism be true.
Ellwood Knox, former President of Tufts University, and a noted Universalist minister of the 19th Century, delivered a sermon on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Winchester Profession of Faith in which he summed up eloquently the way by which both he and I have been led to this happy faith called Christian Universalism. I can do no better as an apology for my faith than to quote his words.
“Universalism is not a discovery, but a revelation; not a logically elaborated conclusion, but an insight. Its founders were seers, not scholars. They were familiar with their Bibles, but read them with the expectant eye of spiritual aspiration rather than the critical view of the exegete. Accordingly the genius of Universalism is intuitive rather than critical, philosophical or scholastic. It is spiritual rather than intellectual. It is founded upon certain elemental instincts of human nature rather than upon research and erudition….
“So radical a thesis needs some justification. I find it first in the nature of the faith itself. It seems to me that Universalism is a trust rather than a tenet; a mood more than a formula; and as to its form it is a simple affirmation not a complex dogma.
“Primarily, Universalism is a doctrine of salvation—originally of eschatology alone. Perceiving that nothing but a happy outlook for mankind would satisfy the reflective mind or the generous heart, the fathers leaped at once to the great conclusion of a united and holy destiny. Later they read back to the premises upon which that conclusion can properly be based, and found them, first in the purpose of a Divine Sovereign, next in love as the essential quality of the Divine nature, then in the universal Fatherhood, then in the universal brotherhood, and finally in the universality of moral law and the omnipotence of right and truth.
“That all these were rather perceived than argued and rested upon something temperamental in the mind itself rather than upon formal proofs, may be inferred from the fact (which can hardly be doubted) that no scripture or science or philosophy which could now be affirmed, short of unsettling faith in God Himself, could destroy the optimism we feel.”
So, there it is, how I came to my faith. It is a happy and optimistic faith that sustains me from day to day, Christmas to Christmas, with an expectant eye toward wonderful things to come. It is a faith that fulfills the hope born on the first Christmas morning.
Christmas marks a beginning, the birth of a new day. God told me so.
Merry Christmas!
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Prentice, I composed a reply (comment) to this on Thursday, but when I submitted it something went haywire & it apparently disappeared into the “black hole” of cyberspace. Too bad — I’d given lots of scrutiny, proofreading & review before I hit “submit”.
Perhaps it was too long a reply? I think it was close to the length of this, your initial posting!
In sum, I reiterated how universal salvation (which I toyed with while a student at Brite, due to coursework on Romans 11) seems very attractive and in line with Abba God loving every one of His human creatures, and the doctrine that Jesus (Abba’s Word made flesh) died for all. But for it to apply to ALL human beings, God would have to force Himself on some, because thanks to our God-given freedom of choice between good and evil there will always be persons who choose to keep me-myself-and-I number one and will refuse to submit to any “higher power” (as AA would put it). I summed up this by affirming that the truth is that when a person says “My will be done, not yours, God!” en’uf times, the logical final response from Abba will be “Okay, your will be done”. And the obstinate, unrepentant person bears the consequences.
I also mentioned in my lengthy reply that I don’t believe that this consequence is eternal, endless torment in a fiery hell. That when Jesus and the NT writers spoke of things like the “lake of fire” enduring forever, they were using a metaphor for its EFFECTS. I firmly stand with the NT teaching that God alone is immortal (the so-called doctrine of the immortality of the human soul isn’t supported in scripture). And so when an unrepentant person is before God at the Judgment and remains obstinate, she or he suffers annihilation. As will our old evil Adversary and his demons (fallen angels). Only the good will remain to endure for eternity.
I also mentioned that in evangelism I would certainly emphasize the Good News of Abba’s love made manifest in the death and resurrection of the Nazarene, over threatening non-believers with hellfire and brimstone — or annihiation! Honey draws flies quicker than vinegar, the proverb says!