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Am I a universalist? That's a question I get a surprising number of times. So let's talk about it.
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Am I a universalist? Hell yeah. Now that might be a bit of an overstatement. I'm not sure that I actually am a universalist in the proper sense, although that is what I hope to be. I think that's where I'm at when I'm at my most optimistic, most filled with the love and grace of God.
Speaker 1:Now this is an interesting one. I mean time to time I get messages from people asking me if I'm a universalist and if I am a universalist can I still be Christian? And people who have listened to my sermons and teaching or watch some of our videos at Commons might have that question. I find it a little bit fascinating because it's not really the first thing that I lead with. It's actually not really the defining part of my Christianity.
Speaker 1:That to me is always the centrality of Christ, the way that I'm doing my best to follow the pattern of Christ in the world. That's where I ground my identity as a Christian here in this world. What I believe about what happens after I die or after you die, I mean that seems a bit of speculation to me, but it is something that's informed by my faith in Christ and the way that I read the Bible. And so because enough people have asked me about it, I I would throw together some ideas about why I lean in that direction, where I get that from both when it comes to the Scriptures, but also from a philosophical standpoint and how I make sense of that in the light of my Christianity. So first off, am I a universalist?
Speaker 1:Well, again, this is where I want to be. It's what I'm hoping towards. But there are times that I struggle with that. There's times where I'm more cynical. There's times when I look around the world around me and I'm just like, is no way that God can possibly heal all of this.
Speaker 1:God can redeem all of us. And I don't get too stressed out about that. When I look at the Apostle Paul writing in the New Testament, I see all of this contradiction and this struggle within him all the time, this conflict as he comes to make more and more sense of what it means to live in the light of the story of Christ. I see him in one moment leaning into those same cultural expectations around sexuality and family and what that has to look like in very rigid terms. In another I see him blowing off the doors and exclaiming that nothing can separate us from the love of God that comes to find us in Christ.
Speaker 1:And so I feel that kind of tension sometimes. I want to believe that God is at work redeeming, healing, fixing everything, all of creation, including all of us. And then there are times I'm a little more cynical when I see some of the brokenness around me. And I think that struggle is just being honest with the reality of what it means to believe in a story that's probably too good for any of us to wrap our minds around. But let's come back to this question of universality.
Speaker 1:Let's come back to this question of hell that seems to be really important for a lot of people. There seems to be a lot of people for which hell is at least as important to their spirituality as is their faith in Jesus. And I really wonder about that. I heard someone teaching about hell and they said, Listen, without hell you can't have a just God. Without hell how do you explain all of the brokenness in the world?
Speaker 1:It is a necessity in order to believe in a good God. And to me that just seems so incoherent with the actual story of God that we see revealed in Christ, but it also seems to be the absolutely most human doctrine we have ever come up with in the Christian tradition. The idea that people are going to get what is coming to them, that justice is retributive, and all of those people who have done all of these bad things are finally going to get their just desserts seems like the most human, the most normal, the most karmic doctrine that has ever found its way into the Christian story. In fact, it seems to work against the very core of the gospel idea that if we come to Christ, if we come to embrace Christ in a conscious way, then the slate is wiped clean and we will go to heaven regardless. If hell is important specifically because it upholds the justice of God by repaying people for the evil that they've done, it undermines the very premise of why we're all Christian in the first place.
Speaker 1:This idea that what we do and how we do it does not alter the fact that God loves us, God comes to find us, God saves us and brings us home to the work, life, death, resurrection of Jesus. Now I understand where the concept of hell comes from. It comes from the Bible. I understand people who hold on to that. But if your premise for holding on to hell and keeping it at the center of your Christianity is the idea that evil needs to be repaid with more evil, I think you've ultimately missed the story of grace and you have centered the most natural normative human doctrine we could ever come up with.
Speaker 1:Hell is essentially karma writ large across human history. I've also heard another argument saying that look at the majority of the church has always believed in hell and I think that's true to some extent. I think the concept of hell very much is one that has always been part of the Christian tradition. I'll talk about why I believe in hell as well, and I think we have to if we're going to hold to a biblical view of the world. I don't think this idea of eternal conscious torment, though, sits the center of what the church has always believed about this word hell.
Speaker 1:It is however the majority view that has dominated the last let's say fifteen hundred years of the church and does continue to hold sway in most of the church today. Somebody actually sent me a sermon from someone who was making the argument that if you don't believe in hell you're probably a little bit racist. And their idea here was that the global South, the churches there tend to believe in a literal hell of eternal conscious torment, and if as a white person you reject that idea, you are somehow racist for rejecting that idea. I think that's a terrible argument. I think if you discard something simply because black and brown Christians believe it then that shit is racist.
Speaker 1:To have reasons to reject those ideas and yet still take seriously our brothers and sisters, our siblings in the global South. I think this is actually the duty of what it means to continue addressing our theology, to continue evolving it, to continue carrying it forward into the future in dialogue with the larger church. In fact, if it was racist to reject ideas from the global South within Christianity, then it would be racist to reject Hinduism or Islam or any of these different religions that are populated by people who are not necessarily white. Bottom line is, do we need to listen to the global South? Absolutely.
Speaker 1:But I think a lot of the times we're not taking them seriously on things like economics, on things like justice, on things like the way that the kingdom of God works itself out in the social systems and structures of this world. But all of a sudden when they endorse perspectives that we are more familiar with, that we're more comfortable with, we want to use them and weaponize them to back up our arguments. Actually I think that's just a really specious argument. I think it's one we need to move away from. I do think we always want to be listening to those voices that come from outside of our particular culture, the particular part of church that we're from.
Speaker 1:None of us have a monopoly on God and the more different perspectives that we take seriously that we're willing to learn from, then the better idea of God we're going to have in the end. Absolutely we need to listen to each other. Absolutely. I want to listen to those who disagree with me on this particular position. So let's talk about how I think about universalism.
Speaker 1:We'll talk about it first from the biblical argument. What are the verses that support it? How do I deal with some of the verses that seem to argue for eternal conscious torment? Then we'll talk about philosophically why I move towards this idea when I try to make sense of the larger story of God's grace in the world as we see it, as we encounter it in Jesus. Now, first of all, let me say the Bible is complex and it does contain all kinds of different perspectives on all kinds of different issues, including this one.
Speaker 1:So I expect us to find verses that lean into a more human understanding of God's justice, something that would lean towards a hell of torment. I would expect us to find verses that lean into a more natural explanation for life and death that we live and we die and that's the end of it, I would expect to find verses that lean into our most optimistic ideas of who God is and what God is doing in the world. None of that really bothers me, and I think we're being dishonest with ourselves or not being intellectually honest if we pretend that the Bible has only one view on what happens after we die. After all, when we speak about an afterlife, we are using language drawn from our experience of this world to talk about something that comes next. We don't have language.
Speaker 1:We don't have metaphors to talk about an afterlife. All we have is language and images, metaphors drawn from this life. And because our lives are varied and our perspectives are varied, then our metaphors are going to be that way as well. Even though you can make a strong argument that there are normative views in the tradition of the church, Bible itself is not at all clear on this. There are varied verses pushing in all kinds of different directions.
Speaker 1:So let's look at some of the ones that for me make a strong argument for the idea that God is at work right now through the work of Jesus healing, redeeming, fixing all of creation. We'll look at a few different types of categories. First, let's take a look at Paul. Now, already read two verses from Romans where Paul makes an argument that sounds very much like a universal salvation, that in Adam sin entered the world, it infected all of us just by the act of one man and by the obedience of one man, the Christ, all will be saved. Because of that, there is nothing, neither heights nor depths, width nor breadth, nothing that can separate us from the love of God.
Speaker 1:And I would point out here that Paul does not leave a caveat saying that your sin can separate you from God. That's not possible. Your sin is not capable of changing God. Your sin is not capable of changing God's posture towards you. God loves you.
Speaker 1:God wants to heal you. God is active right now, drawing you toward God's self. And regardless how far that process gets in this life, in this moment, in this seventy years that you have on this planet, none of that will ever change because you are simply not powerful enough to overrule the work of Christ. Plus, making a pretty explicit He also makes this argument in Ephesians. He says, With all wisdom and understanding, God has made known to us the mystery of God's will according to His pleasure, which He purposed in Christ to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment, to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ.
Speaker 1:In other words, the work of Christ is now knitting together, repairing and healing all things, all of creation, all of our systems, including all of humanity. Later in chapter four of the same letter, he says that he who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all of the heavens in order to fill the whole universe. So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors, the teachers to equip his people for works of service so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity knowledge and the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Again, can delineate these things and we can say that all of these alls that Paul uses actually are not referring to all of us the way that Paul uses all when he speaks of all having sinned, but the truth is we're just making interpretive decisions when we do that. Paul says all have sinned.
Speaker 1:Paul says that we will all be brought to unity in the fullness of Christ. Paul says that all of creation is tainted and marred by the brokenness that surrounds us. Paul says that all of creation is knit together, held together, and being brought together through Christ. The same argument that Paul is making for the deadliness and the damage of sin is the same argument Paul is making for the goodness and the healing of Christ. In fact, when Paul talks about the deadliness of sin, he says that the wages of sin is death.
Speaker 1:That's over in Romans again, chapter six. But the gift of God is eternal life. This idea that death is what we bring into the world. Death is what we bring when we're on our own. We're not inherently immortal, and yet it is the gift of God, this eternal life that is offered to us in Christ Jesus.
Speaker 1:This is only the work of Christ is only the gift of God that even allows us to continue on into whatever comes next after this moment. In the same way we have what we sometimes call the Deuteropolian letters. Now, here I'm talking about the pastoral epistles like First Timothy. There are arguments saying that these are not written by Paul. There's someone writing in the spirit of Paul, a disciple of Paul writing in the voice of Paul.
Speaker 1:But regardless of whether you attribute these to the actual historical disciple who comes along after and writes, you read in First Timothy chapter two that we may live peacefully and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. This is good and pleases God our Savior who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. So God wants everyone to come and know the fullness and the grace and the saving knowledge of God. And then he follows up later in chapter four and reads, This is why we labor and strive. It's why we work hard to go out and evangelize and tell the story and invite people in because we have put our hope in the living God who is the savior of all people and especially all of those who believe.
Speaker 1:God is the savior of everyone, especially those of us who believe, especially those of us who have been invited in and accepted the story and begun to work on behalf of it in the world right now. But God is no less the savior of everyone, even those perhaps who reject the story now in this moment right now. We work hard, we labor and strive because we want people to know the fullness of God's grace as quickly as possible, as completely as possible, but it never implies that God is still not their savior, that God is ever going to leave them outside of God's grace. And all of this seems to be a continuation of everything that we're reading all throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. All the way back in Genesis, we hear that all peoples on earth will be blessed through Abraham.
Speaker 1:Later in the New Testament, we come to understand that Jesus is the ultimate seed of Abraham. In the Psalms we read that all the ends of the earth and all the families of all nations will eventually acknowledge God. That's Psalm 22. In Psalm 65 we read, Praise await to our God in Zion. To You our vows will be fulfilled, for you answer prayer.
Speaker 1:To you all people will come. That's Psalm 65. The whole concept of the Hebrew Scriptures is that at the end of time all of the nations will come and bow before God. They will see God for who God really is. They will give up their false gods and worship the one true God who sits at the founding of creation.
Speaker 1:This is the narrative from the beginning that all peoples will eventually come to know God. So what do we do with all those verses that talk about hell and fire and punishment and torment? Because those are very real and they are very much part of our biblical witness. Well, again, me, think the biggest issue is that we are always dealing with a multiplicity of images. The Scriptures are not pulling any punches when it comes to sin.
Speaker 1:They are not trying to lighten the load when it comes to the effect of sin in the world. There is very much a torment. There's a weight. There's a guilt. There's a heaviness to carrying all of the ways that we injure and hurt each other throughout our lives.
Speaker 1:The image of torment, the image of fire is very much one of the ways the Bible speaks of this. But what exactly is the Bible talking about when it uses those images? And one of the very famous ones is in Mark nine when Jesus talks about hell being this place of torment where the fire is never quenched and the worm never dies. And that's actually a reference all the way back to Isaiah 66, where the prophet is describing a literal battlefield where dead bodies have been left to rot or burning chariots are strewn across the land. And the writer says, look, this is the outcome of your wars.
Speaker 1:This is what happens when you allow your sin to turn into all of these different types of brokenness and warfare in the People die and their bodies are burned up. The maggots eat the flesh and friends and people we love are never properly buried and honored. At the end of the battle, the fire is not gonna be put out. The chariots are not going to be restored. The worm will never be quenched, those bodies will never be restored to the friendships they once had.
Speaker 1:The prophet's literally not talking about a fire that goes on forever, that battlefield would still be smoldering today if that was the case. The writer was talking about the natural consequence of the sin once we start it, that it carries itself forward to its natural consequence. And this is the image that Jesus now pulls forward and uses to speak not just of our battles and our wars, but of all the battles and wars we wage when we hurt each other, our sin in the world. He says it's exactly the same way. We are causing damage, we are causing pain, and all of that pain will live out its narrative until it finally comes to the gruesome end it deserves.
Speaker 1:When you understand where Jesus is quoting from, you get a better sense of what he's talking about. Of course, this isn't the only example. Also in Matthew 25, Jesus talks about the sheep and the goats and separating those out and how those who did good, who helped the poor and the needy, who visited the sick and dying in the prisoner, they will be welcomed into God's presence, but the goats, they will be sent away into eternal torment. There's a couple of things we have to understand here. First of all, this is a parable.
Speaker 1:We're not actually sheep and goats, so Jesus is moving us away from literal imagery into metaphoric imagery here. And that's a good clue for us to make sense of what's going on here. But secondly, this is probably also not the image that we're going to go to when it comes to explaining the gospel. This is an image that is very much telling us we are going to be saved. We are going to be ushered into the presence of God by our works.
Speaker 1:Did we care for the needy? Did we bring water to those who are thirsty? Did we visit the prisoner? If we did, great. If not, not so much, which is not generally our typical understanding of what the gospel means when we talk about inviting Jesus into our hearts.
Speaker 1:But secondly, if we look closely at this image here, what we're gonna see is that the nations are gathered before Jesus on his throne and the nations are separated into the sheep and the goats. And the sheep are welcomed into God's kingdom. The goats are sent into torment. But if we take Jesus literally here, then the sheep and the goats are nations. They are systems and structures that we have set up to either serve those near us or to exclude those.
Speaker 1:And those will be either brought forward into the kingdom of God or sent into hellfire to be extinguished, which is exactly what we read about the lake of fire when we get to Revelation. If you actually read closely in Revelation 20, you're going to see that it is the devil who has deceived and is thrown into the lake of fire, the beast and the false prophet where they are tormented day and night forever. Then it is Hades and death that are thrown in as well. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone's name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.
Speaker 1:All of those that are thrown into the fire represent systems and structures. Death, Hades, politics, empire, economics. This is what's thrown in. Nations, systems, and structures that ignore the plight of the needy. This is very much in line with the purpose of these images in Revelation which we read in chapter 11 which is the mission statement, now comes the time to destroy that which destroys the earth.
Speaker 1:This is not human beings being thrown into a lake of fire, This is systems, structures, things that we have created to oppress each other. All of these have a limited shelf life and they will one day be destroyed. In fact, it's the destruction of those systems that is part salvation of those of us who are freed now from the systems that have bound us. That's what Jesus is talking about in Matthew 25. That's what Revelation is talking about in chapter 20.
Speaker 1:And this is what actually moves me to the argument that really pushes me over the edge. Again, I think the biblical evidence is mixed. Think probably the normative expectation in the Bible is that when you die, you die. That's certainly the normative expectation in the Hebrew Scriptures. The next most common idea is that the work of Jesus has so fundamentally changed the equation in the universe that everything is being re knit together and healed and saved in the light of Christ.
Speaker 1:And there are these images that seem to say that the brokenness and sin that we have contaminated the world with has at sometimes perhaps infected us so much to the level that without God's special grace we will be doomed to be consumed by it. But the Bible is full of all of these different images. And so what pushes me over the edge is now or probably better said the theological arguments for God's work in the world. And this is what I'm talking about when I talk about the destruction of that which destroys the earth. That ultimately God is love.
Speaker 1:That's the grounding characteristic of God in the Bible. God may act in ways that are angry. God may act in ways that are merciful. God may act in ways that are just. God may act in ways that are unjust.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's the center of the cross after all. Nobody ever gets what they deserve. So all of these different ways that God acts are contingent on some defining characteristic of God. And I would argue in the Bible that is love. God can be angry, God can be merciful, but God is always love.
Speaker 1:And that means that every action that we understand God taking, everything that we understand God doing in the world has to be filtered through the lens of love. If we can't explain God's actions as loving then they are not God's actions, they are human projections that we have mapped onto the divine. Now is there a way to think of anything less than universal salvation as loving? I think there actually is. I think that if we live our life in a way where we are completely rejecting God, where we have crafted an identity for ourselves that wants nothing to do with goodness and selflessness and grace and love, I think it actually can be the loving gift of God that allows us to simply expire.
Speaker 1:That the wages of our sin have become so great that there is nothing left to redeem within us, and the gift of God is that God allows us to simply not be. That if God recognizes that to be in the presence of God is something that will not be pleasurable, it will not be good, it will not be something that we enjoy, it will not be something that is loving to subject us to. Perhaps God simply allows us to no longer exist. I think there is room for conditionalism, this idea that we are not inherently immortal and that after death if we do not accept the gift of God which is eternal life in Christ, then we simply inherit the natural consequence of our sin. This is why I say I'm not always necessarily a universalist.
Speaker 1:I think there is room for the idea of an eternal death, an eternal destruction if you will. Not the idea of an eternal destruction where God continually destroys you without ever actually destroying you. That's not eternal destruction by the way, but an eternal destruction where you cease to be and that is the end of it. I think that does make sense in the concept of a loving God who allows us to choose what we want. And ironically, I think this is the best argument against Universalism, this idea of conditionalism because what it says to me is that God wants to save everything, God is interested in healing everything, but God demonstrates God's weakness in allowing us to choose.
Speaker 1:I think this is the most biblical approach to allowing something other than universal salvation. That God is primarily not defined by God's strength and God's power. In fact, God is so powerful that the only thing God wants to do with that power is to give it away. I think as human beings, the more powerful we get, the more we want to grab a hold of power and demonstrate it to each other. But when you are a God who can do anything, create anything, be anything to us, the only thing God wants to be is a relational partner with us.
Speaker 1:And so God gives that power away, God gives us the ability to choose, God subjects God self to our choices. And it's actually this giving away, this weakness that allows us to reject God, that allows us to expire and not move into an eternity with God. In fact, it's the weakness of God that God chooses to demonstrate on the cross that is for me the only argument against any kind of universal salvation. But again, all of this is driven by the concept that whatever God is at the core of God's being, God is love. That's the whole concept of Trinity.
Speaker 1:Before there was anything, God was a communal body of give and take, gift and reception and love. Before there was a universe, there was love and God is love. This is why any punishment that we see has to be grounded in the concept of God's love. Is there room for punishment? Is there room for pruning?
Speaker 1:I think absolutely. I think a coherent concept of hell can be God's punishment for a sin that rips away everything that is broken within us, leaving only what is pure and created by God. I think there is room for judgment and punishment in whatever life comes after this, but all of that has to be rooted in the concept of God's healing redemptive love. This is why the idea of an infinite punishment for a finite crime is nonsensical. There is no love in that.
Speaker 1:There is only hatred and retribution which cannot be found in the character of God. First of all, that's not just in any meaningful sense. There is no crime that you could ever commit that would justify an eternal punishment. Now there are specious arguments that are made for this. The idea that God is so good, so holy, and so above you that any crime you commit against God is an eternal crime.
Speaker 1:The argument goes like this, if you crush a butterfly that's a bad thing, if you kill a human being that's so much worse because a human is so much more important than a butterfly. Therefore, since God is infinitely more important than a human, a sin against God is infinitely more vile than a sin against a human. I just don't think this is a compelling argument. There is no way an infinite punishment is ever commensurate to a finite crime. It just doesn't make sense.
Speaker 1:You could argue that it might take millions of years of punishment to ever total up to the crime that you commit against God. I can see that in some sense, but infinite is infinite. We can barely even wrap our minds around that as human beings, and I don't think you can ever claim that is just. So does hell fit within the Christian story? Of course it does.
Speaker 1:Every time I injure someone, I create a small slice of hell for them and I inflect that hell back upon my soul. The more that I do this, the more I lean into us, the farther away from God I move in this world, the farther away from God I move in whatever comes next. And the drawing back, the cleansing, the purifying, the stripping away of everything that's broken within me, all of that becomes that much more painful because I've allowed it to become part of my identity. These images of weeping and gnashing of teeth, the fire and worms that are never quenched. All of this makes a lot of sense to me in a future where God will heal all things and all things that are broken.
Speaker 1:Everything that destroys God's creation will eventually be destroyed. The more I cultivate in me that which destroys, the more there will be in me that needs to be destroyed. But any way that God acts towards me, whether in this life or the next, will always be grounded in God's love. And this is why I choose to believe in my best, optimistic moments when I am most captured by the story of God's grace, the story of Jesus in my life, and the spirit around me today. That God is at work right now healing, fixing, redeeming all things, including my mind, including my choices, including this creation in this world around me, including every single person who has ever lived.
Speaker 1:That process may be long, it may be painful, it may confront us with everything that we fear, but it is always in the end for our good, which is why I am compelled to continue this job, to continue to tell the story of Christ as best I can, wherever I can, whenever I can. I preach Jesus because I want the people around me to know what it means to be loved right now, trusting that the more they can sense that they are loved and know that this is who they are at the core of their being, that they will be transformed by that into the kind of people God has always imagined them to be. I'm not interested in saving anyone from God because I believe that God has always our best interest in mind. What I am interested in is doing my best to save myself and the people around me from all of the consequences of our sin and fear that drives us to hurt each other and to protect ourselves. Because in that protection of our self, in that driving away of those that are near us, what we are actually doing is moving farther away from the God who sits at the center of the universe, the God who is drawing all of us closer to God's self all the time, the God who will invite all of us to know God in the end.
Speaker 1:And finally let me add one more piece here. I often talk to people who are like, look I understand universalism, I understand your arguments, I understand that God is good and working to heal all things. It sounds great, I wish I could believe it, but here's what I want to leave you with as a question. If you tell me that the idea of God healing and redeeming all things including you and your neighbor sounds like the best possible story and you struggle to believe that that story is true. First I want to say I totally understand it, the world around us is broken all the time and it steals that hope away from me too.
Speaker 1:But if you believe that that is the best story, if it's the story that you want to believe in and yet you believe that God isn't good enough to believe in that, ask yourself who is more moral? You who wants all things and all people to be saved and redeemed and healed or the God who could do it but chooses not to? I actually think most of our concepts of hell, most of our theology around this idea has elevated our human imagination of what justice is, our human imagination of what we would do if we were placed in God's seat with the goodness of God that comes to us through the story of Jesus, through the Spirit who is animating and holding together all of us right now. Your best inclinations, your hopes for what the universe could be, these are reflections of the God who is actually making all of it happen right now and will bring all of time to its conclusion in the goodness and grace that is the heart and love of God.