Undeception

One of the most common rationales for rejecting a belief in universal reconciliation or Christian universalism is what might be called the free will defense against universalism. We are told by Arminians and other non-Calvinists, including recently Roger Olson, that for God to force salvation down our throats would be a violation of human freedom.  He wants us to love Him of our own volition.

My approach to that objection has been to first try to answer the question, why would anyone want to reject God? “I’ll never understand,” sang PFR, “why you would walk away from love.” The universalist responds that no one in his/her right mind would; a good God would not sentence anyone not in their right mind to death (much less to the torture chamber) any more than we would. In fact, surely a loving Creator could hardly be prevented from setting such people back into their right minds, even if they died before the process was complete.

I was delighted to see that in responding to Olson, Eric Reitan has articulated my stance better than I have. For those who can’t be bothered to read his long and excellent post, I offer this excerpt:

On the broadly Christian picture of reality, God is the infinite objective good Who is the source of all finite goods. And as such, all creaturely goods flow from God. To be cut off from God is to be cut off from one’s own good. To see and understand the truth about reality, given this portrait of what that reality is like, is to see and understand that nothing good can come from alienation from God. And to see and understand this is to see and understand that there is no reason–NONE–to reject God. All possible motives for such rejection are exposed as vacuous.

Furthermore, it is hard to credit the idea that creatures who are a product of this infinite and infinitely good God would be designed in such a way that they would gravitate towards this ultimate good when presented with it in an unclouded way. We are naturally ordered to union with God, Aquinas maintains, in such a way that when presented with an unclouded vision of the divine we cannot help but love and long for it. Aquinas therefore thought that no creature of God, made for union with God, could, once presented with an unambiguous vision of God, choose to reject God. The clear sight of the summum bonum would swamp all other desires and expose all false beliefs about the choice-worthiness of rejecting God.

If one rejected God under those circumstances, it would have to be because human free will is subject to some kind of bizarre randomness that could act against all a creature’s converging motives, leading them to do what they neither want to do nor think there is any good reason to do. And Aquinas did not believe that free will operated in this perverse way. Indeed, if free will were nothing more than randomness at work in human choices, it would hardly be a gift of God. More like a curse. To be saved or damned by a flip of the coin is hardly better than being saved by divine “coercion.”

Exactly.

I mentioned in passing in “Sinners in the hands of an ___ God” that I think universalism has the tendency to overshoot our focus in terms of practical Christian living (Richard Beck agrees). Although I doubt that it does this significantly more than most preoccupations with the hereafter, I do want to suggest that one particular pitfall that people in conservative Christian leadership are keen to point out to those of us who are less traditional in our soteriology actually has some validity to it.

It’s this: I’ve found that Christians whose theology has left the Fundamentalist/Evangelical staging grounds are simultaneously the most likely to lean toward radical inclusivism and the least likely to talk about personal sin. In fact, I expect that many of them won’t get much further than this paragraph before saying, “Not interested. Can’t we get on with talking about how wrong and silly conservative Christians are?”

Now, the reasoned universalists I’m familiar with do not fall into this category nearly as much as those who sort of end up in essential universalism by default after leaving the mainstream Evangelical Christianity herd. “God is love; God won’t condemn; God will give us all bear hugs, especially if we advocate for the marginalized.” It seems that those in this latter group allow the idea of God’s forgiveness of sin to morph into an assumption about God’s disregarding sins – well, sins other than fundamentalist bigotry, anyway. But I think this is a reflex of a faulty view of what constitutes sin in the first place.

The libertarian/classical liberal political philosophy is often summarized as the conviction that, so long as an action does not adversely affect another’s life, liberty, or property, no one has the right to interfere with another’s actions, even when operating under the name of “government”. It’s often noted that while the American Right only honors that philosophy in economic matters, the American Left instead champions that ideal in social matters: let them sleep with whomever they want to, smoke or inject themselves with whatever they want to, and you’re probably a closeted theocrat if you vote otherwise! Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that many theological progressives (who highly correlate with those on the political Left) give the impression that if it doesn’t directly hurt my neighbor, it’s not really sin — or even if it is sin of some sort, it’s not the sort we need to obsess over. Without stating it explicitly, the implication is that God doesn’t poke His head too far into your private business. Love your neighbor and don’t hurt anyone, and you’ll probably be fine.

But if, as I’ve argued in my two earlier posts on this topic (1, 2), sin is conceived as that behavior which is characteristic of a damaged will, our salvation is best thought of as healing and liberation that helps us avoid sin by all means possible through participation in the life of the Spirit.

I agree with my fellow post-conservative Christians that personal (unobtrusive, non-violent, “libertarian”-friendly) sins don’t steam God one little bit. After all, He’s not a peevish tyrant who just arbitrarily decided that He doesn’t like certain things and then judges people for it, and nor is He bound to uphold some esoteric perfectionistic criterion that exists external to Himself. If He hates sin, He hates it for a perfectly good reason.

Under the disease model, sin is bad for the same reason that bleeding from an open wound is bad: it’s a symptom of a problem that, left alone or ignored, produces an even bigger problem. Even surface wounds can turn ugly if left untreated, and in the same way that internal bleeding is anything but desirable, even secret or relatively “contained” sinning is unhealthy. God wants us well, and to the extent that we’re happy to retain our sicknesses, we’re evincing an illness of the will that we should hasten to surrender to our Father’s healing hands much as a child runs to her parents when she thinks she might have broken her arm (even if she hurt it doing something she shouldn’t have been doing).

It’s temptingly convenient to do as many public figures do and separate pet “vices” from the type of moral shortcomings that we feel actually need to be addressed. But as long as the behavior is recognized as a “vice” or “character flaw” it should be rejected, not coddled. Our own personal holiness is something worth intently striving for, and to allay the fears of theological progressives, that concern does not compete with compassion for the hurting and marginalized: attuning our heart to God’s heart will purify and deepen the motivation behind our benevolent actions. And remember, the founder of our faith emphasized personal righteousness no less than he did compassion.

If all this makes me seem like something of a Puritan universalist, I need to clarify something. This is a much more positive view than that of the Puritans or the old time holiness preachers. While I do believe we need to be diligent about identifying the flaws in our own character, where the predominant view of sin goes wrong is in the implication that we should always be obsessed with hunting it down in ourselves and others. Our goal is not to agonize over every sinful inclination but to develop the mind of Christ within ourselves. We cultivate good health, not just the elimination of sicknesses; treatment for illness is the last resort, whereas prevention through healthy lifestyles is how we occupy ourselves. We don’t fear sin for judgment’s sake, because God intends to heal us of it rather than smite or reject us for it; we avoid sin by chasing down perfection, focusing on what is true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, reputable, and praiseworthy. As I was told long ago in youth group, the point of Christian freedom isn’t to allow us to get as close to the “sin” line as we possibly can get without stepping over it, but to allow us to make all haste to leave it as far behind as possible and pursue righteousness.

The Bible occasionally presents ancient, outdated, and arcane standards for what constitutes sin; in fact, quite often it’s referring to breaking certain aspects of Torah, which most Christians no longer put any stock in. But I am uncomfortable throwing the Bible out as an educator in areas of “reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness.” Granted, we can’t proof-text sin: behavior is not sinful simply because it’s spoken of unfavorably – or even named as sin – in any particular verse. When someone in Scripture condemns a certain behavior it is only sinful if there’s an actual rationale underlying its biblical censure. Remember, I don’t think God dictates our behavior based on an inscrutable, immutable, abstract, and essentially arbitrary Cosmic Code of Conduct. This much I get. But I do wonder if we liberals should take the admonitions of our faith’s forefathers a bit more seriously; for instance, I can certainly understand why the author of Ephesians might not have been just a prudish killjoy when he advised his audience against drunkenness.  I also want to suggest that we should tread a little more lightly in lifting biblical bans on behavior even when at first glance we fail to see why the biblical authors considered it problematic; for instance, do we have a good enough reason to override the biblical censure on “coarse language”, even if it doesn’t seem like such an awful thing to us? More often than not, I find that there are virtues we all believe in that properly motivate bans on the behaviors that populate those lists of sins we find (e.g.) in Paul’s epistles.

So yes, sometimes upon reflection clarity will surface about where the “sin” line should be drawn: but don’t forget for a minute that there is such a line. Sin that is destructive of others is obviously wrong: but so is self-destructive sin. Jesus reportedly taught that even thinking sinful thoughts is sin — it is against God’s nature and symptomatic of our diseased wills. I would caution against making too firm a distinction between violent sin that hurts others and contained, internal, personal “flaws”: jealousy, bitterness, pride, lackadaisical attitudes about sex, the impulse to call people names and seize each opportunity to demonize their character or intelligence — all of these tendencies must be steadfastly resisted because not only are they contrary to God’s character, if left untreated they have real world effects. Mark and Matthew record Jesus, echoing Proverbs, warning that what our minds are occupied with will eventually spill out.

Even when we give up the idea that sin is some sort of legal offense against God, we can recognize that He desperately wants to uproot it from us with our cooperation. And to the extent that we don’t share His concern, we should submit ourselves to Him for the renewing of our minds.

Jesus did not die to save us from punishment; he was called Jesus because he should save his people from their sins.

~ George MacDonald

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This is Part 3 of a series. Here are the other posts:

Part 1: Sinners in the hands of a ____ God

Part 2: God’s Awful Mistake

I’ve recently had the chance to introduce my children to a book I loved as a kid: it’s called Henry’s Awful Mistake, by Robert Quackenbush.

Here’s how it begins:

“The day Henry the Duck asked his friend Clara over for supper, he found an ant in the kitchen. The ant would have to go. Henry was afraid Clara would see it and think he didn’t keep a clean house.”

Henry's Awful Mistake by Robert Quackenbush

So what does Henry do? Naturally, he picks up a frying pan and smashes the ant. Or maybe not — the ant is rather clever and evasive (or Henry’s just a really bad shot). The book progresses with Henry trying his best to dispose of the ant before his dinner date shows up. Unfortunately for Henry, he becomes more obsessed with killing the ant than he is about keeping his house tidy: as he strikes at the elusive ant repeatedly with increasingly destructive force, he carelessly begins dismantling his house!

Increasingly exasperated by the ant’s uncanny ability to elude him, he finally espies the ant sitting on a pipe that’s been exposed behind a wall he has just smashed a hole in. Henry misses the ant, but he doesn’t miss the pipe, which (spoiler alert) ends up flooding his now completely desolate house. In his attempt to destroy the ant and thereby prove his fastidious care for his home, Henry has utterly destroyed his house and profoundly proved the opposite.

As I pointed out in my last post, viewing God’s hatred of sin as fundamentally a reaction to its being a challenge to His authority that He cannot leave unpunished or a failure to live up to a perfect standard of righteousness that deserves the death penalty usually ends up conceptualizing God as in some way bound to condemn sinners because of sin. “But of course sinners are condemned because of sin!” That’s such a basic understanding of Christianity that it might seem odd to think that I would challenge it. But I’m not going to challenge it so much as nuance it properly: I don’t believe God “condemns” in the sense of irrevocable damnation, but He may well have an interest in “keeping after class” those of us who need to have their problems rooted out. Even this He does as a doctor cares for a patient, not as an irrational duck bludgeoning his walls with a hammer in an effort to win the Good Housekeeping Award.

The teaching that our sinful nature is an illness isn’t some post-modern rationalization: it’s found both in Scripture and in ancient church tradition. It’s even occasionally affirmed by those who also affirm the models I’ve been critiquing. Witness the Lutheran Augsburg Confession:

That is, all men are full of evil lust and inclinations from their mothers’ wombs and are unable by nature to have true fear of God and true faith in God. Moreover, this inborn sickness and hereditary sin is truly sin and condemns to the eternal wrath of God all those who are not born again through Baptism and the Holy Spirit. [emphasis mine]

My own “confession” is that the incongruity of this baffles me: why would any child born with a hereditary illness warrant “wrath” — apart, perhaps, from self-loathing for bringing such a child into the world? Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater…bathwater that was dirty before you even put the baby into it.

If sin is the result of a sickness of the will, every one of us who sins is dreadfully in need of God’s saving power. But this salvation isn’t to spare us from punishment awaiting us due to His wrath: salvation is God’s simmering rage concentrated on burning away at the parasitical urge for self-destruction endemic to us all. Gradually, painstakingly, and in cooperation with the part of our will that remains functional, God through sanctification is curing the diseased part of our minds that prevents us from living as the healthy souls He wants us to be. Our salvation is about God loving us enough to pry from our grasp our characteristically human inclinations toward choosing the way of death; what it’s not about is God magnanimously exempting small selections of us from being collateral damage of His war on sin.

As should be obvious by now, just because I don’t believe God is in any way obligated to damn us because of our sins doesn’t mean that I think sin or even divine discipline for sin are passé concepts. This seems to put me at odds with many of my more progressive friends. I’ll have more to say to them in my last post on this topic.

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This is Part 2 of a series. Here are the other posts:

Part 1: Sinners in the hands of a ____ God

Part 3: Is righteousness underrated by liberal Christians?

In the next few posts, I’ll be discussing my views on sin and God’s reaction to it. But first it’s necessary to define it. When we talk about sin, what do we mean?

Can “sin” be defined as a mistake or error in judgment? That is what politicians admit to when they perpetrate white-collar crimes, cheat on their wives, or whatever they’re trying to admit to without getting crucified for. This doesn’t seem to be quite adequate: misappropriating funds for personal gain or violating your spouse’s trust are hardly “whoopsie” moments — there’s some sort of moral or ethical violation going on. And killing someone because they ran in front of your vehicle is certainly not a violation of morality, so intentionality is obviously an important component. I think “a consciously undertaken moral violation” is probably a safe working definition for sin for the purposes of these posts.

(Note, of course, that to be complete we’d have to then define “moral”, but I think Christians generally agree that there are certain moral absolutes, and Christians are my intended audience here.)

The more interesting question is God’s relationship to our consciously undertaken violations of morality, such as lying, cheating, stealing, committing adultery, murder, etc. Which of the following do you find yourself resonating with the most?

1. God’s objection: God hates sin because it is a challenge to His position of supremacy over the universe. God takes great personal offense at sin.
• God’s disposition toward sinners: Sinners are primarily competitors to God needing to be brought under subjection to His lordship.
• The sinner’s predicament: Because the sinner’s will is corrupt, he stands in danger of God’s wrath intended to restore the hierarchy of Creator to creation. Most of all, he needs a miraculous way to submit to God.
• God’s response: Rebellion is a slap in the face of Almighty God. God responds to these slaps in the face according to His nature and relationship with the sinner: specifically, His anger is only mitigated by consideration of the sinner’s submission to Himself through Christ. As Scot McKnight recently put it, “Sin is about usurping, and for us Christians that usurping takes on a powerful christological shape in the NT: it’s about Jesus, it’s about following him. When we choose not to follow Jesus, we choose to become usurpers.”
2. God’s objection: God hates sin because it is a transgression against justice. God sees sin chiefly as a legal offense.
• God’s disposition toward sinners: Sinners are primarily criminals deserving punishment.
• The sinner’s predicament: Because the sinner’s will is corrupt, he stands in danger of God’s wrath, which is necessary to satisfy justice. Most of all, he needs acquittal; penal substitution will accomplish this.
• God’s response: God’s response to sin, whether in punishment or in mercy, is necessitated and determined by an intolerable dissatisfaction that results from the violation of a moral code of justice. Jesus’ atonement was God’s way of satisfying that code of justice so that His loving and merciful nature could be satisfied. As John Frye recently put it, “[If] God is just, he will pay back trouble. This isn’t ugly, sinful, fitful vengeance. God is just and will pay back.”
  
3. God’s objection: God hates sin because it is a destructive force that interferes with His loving intentions toward us.
• God’s disposition toward sinners: Sinners are primarily those in need of God’s healing; He is only truly satisfied when the will that commits sin has been repaired.
• The sinner’s predicament: Because the sinner’s will is damaged (although not entirely corrupt), the sinner stands in need of rescue.
• God’s response: Sin is both the effect and the cause of a will bent toward immorality. Acts of willful immoral behavior are not imputed to the sinner as a property of the one who commits the act, but as symptoms of a misguided will, which is then warped further by sin. God desires to heal the impulses that would reject Him.

These are certainly not airtight categories, and in fact many of us assume more than one of them on different occasions; for instance, some would say that rebellion (#1) needs to be punished primarily because it is a violation of justice (#2). Indeed, #1 and #2 are much more compatible with one another than either are with #3. Be that as it may, I list them as I have because they are broadly three different and conceivably independent explanations for what accounts for God’s reaction to sin that drive other differences in our theology.

Options #1 and #2 both show the warped will as an integral aspect of the person, and God will not change the person. (But more on that in another post.) When God creates people, He either allows or mandates that their wills become so warped as to choose other than the perfect good; He is then obliged to allow their corrupt wills to rein supreme, even though it means their destruction.

Notice that this holds true regardless of the possible libertarian free will defense, in which people say that God wouldn’t want to violate our free will in order to save us: if our free wills are such that choosing evil seems like a good option, there is something wrong with either our wills or our reasoning capacities, and God is responsible for both. When His creation falls prey to the self-destructive wills He provided them, God (a) may, (b) must, or (c) is glad to (depending on your theology) wash His hands of the affair, granting “Thy will be done.”

C. S. Lewis’s contention that God permits the unrepentant to leave Him behind for eternity to be self-satisfied apart from Himself assumes that issues of the will are issues that God has no intent to remedy; but God cannot be let off the hook as easily as Lewis would have liked. If we “choose” hell, it’s only because God set the deck against us. (And might I add that if he’d read his claimed master George MacDonald even a little more closely, he’d have noticed this fatal flaw.)

If, as the Orthodox have always proclaimed, sin is sickness of the soul eating away at the children of God and a corrupt will is an aberration, God’s behavior in the “sinners choose hell” explanation is directly equivalent to your watching idly as a mentally ill person deliberately walks up to and disturbs a rattlesnake, followed by your shaking your head sadly at their poor choice and the fact that they will soon die of poison. “It’s a shame, but it was her decision.” If there is a perfect, absolute good – which few Christians would deny – then without their Creator’s miraculous intervention humans are either incapable of recognizing it or incapable of choosing it. Neither can be credibly blamed on the sinner. God must assume responsibility; at least supralapsarians are consistent here.

For me, the only explanation is that God intends to heal all because the sin is the root problem, not the sinner. The more damaged the will, the more He’ll feel responsible for repairing it: the further the lost sheep strays, the more necessary He’ll find it to leave the ninety-nine. So yeah, I’m a universalist, for this and other reasons. But that’s not the only reason I’m writing this.

In fact, I’m convinced that focusing on the end has the danger of extending our scope too far to be of practical good in the immediate; as I’ll argue in an upcoming post, the cancer of sin and the disorder of the fallen will cannot simply be shrugged off and assumed to be wiped away without consequence in the distant future of cheap Nirvana.

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This is Part 1 of a series. Here are the other posts:

Part 2: God’s Awful Mistake

Part 3: Is righteousness underrated by liberal Christians?

You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.

~ St. Augustine

There are profound theological implications for one’s understanding of the fate of sinners depending on whether one believes Augustine’s words. Was Augustine correct?

Much of the church’s soteriology in the last several centuries has taken its cue from the very old notion, found in Augustine, that the will of every human is utterly opposed to God. But stated this way, that stance takes no position on the more important issue of whether this state of opposition is intrinsic to us. Many Protestants have mistaken Augustine’s opposition to Pelagius’ tabula rasa as implying that humanity is intrinsically opposed to God, but even Luther’s own terminology recognized that our wills are not naturally predisposed toward enmity with God: rather, our wills are in bondage. The universality of the bondage of the will undercuts the instinct of some among the Reformed who will be quick to suggest that Augustine’s words refer only to the elect. Remember, Augustine was the most important advocate of what we call Original Sin: his contention was that there was a vacuum in every human soul that could only be plugged by God. We are all fallen, but we are fallen into a restlessness of heart, not into a complete rejection of that aspect of our hearts. We are fallen into a bondage of the will.

For me, this basic belief – that whatever fallenness all flesh is heir to is a corruption rather than a default orientation intended by our Creator – frames the whole debate over the fate of those who die in rebellion against God. The human species is designed such that it finds rest only in its home, and its home is with God.

At the outset, I cannot believe that God made people in a certain way and now condemns a majority of them to suffer irredeemably for it. There is no room in my heart or mind for such a view of hell and the afterlife, nor room in this post to persuade those committed to the idea. If you are content with that view, I will not pry it from your fingers, though I hope better for you; I will look elsewhere.

A more Arminian view (although you needn’t be a five-point Arminian to hold this view) is that many sinners will reject God despite having been presented the alternative and being given a genuine choice. They are responsible for their own damnation by defying and resisting God, who (more reluctantly than in the Calvinist view) sends them to hell as just punishment. But to grant this we have to grant a few things that I find problematic. To begin with, I have severe problems with calling a punishment meted out in mere retribution, without any intent or hope for exacting compensation and reconciliation, a “just punishment”.

Perhaps the most popular alternative to that conception of hell as divine satisfaction of justice through punishment of sins, a conception present in both Arminian and Calvinist forms, is that of C. S. Lewis. His famous understanding of hell as outlined especially in The Great Divorce avoids my objection by contending that hell is not as much divine punishment as it is the result of a final and irreconcilable discord between God and sinners that, crucially, is attributable not to God but to a conscious and persistent choice on the part of sinners. For Lewis, those who finally choose to reject God will never, even given endless opportunities in their post-mortem state (the door is “locked from the inside”), take Him up on His offer of reconciliation. To those who wind up in hell, their selfishness is their home and their reward, and God mercifully lets them go with a sigh and a “thy will be done.” This is Lewis’s hell.

That may be a satisfactory solution to my first objection to the Arminian view, but there are pitfalls shared by both the Arminian view and Lewis’s. Once you grant the position of Augustine, Luther, etc. that God crafted the human soul to be oriented even in its fallenness toward home with Himself, you’ve got to satisfactorily answer the question of why certain souls would never ultimately find their way home. I have trouble accepting that anyone who knew enough about hell to make a reasoned and responsible choice would choose hell: these views require either that God callously accepts the impaired decision of an impaired will or that He designed some of us to have wills that, even if let out of their chains long enough to make a free decision, would point in the polar opposite direction from Himself. We have to ask why a God who loves us all would make some of us in such a way that we would not be attracted to His goodness, preferring a destiny where we’d waste away, all to His own bereavement. Would you have a child if you knew beforehand that he would hate you and die in selfishness and bitterness at a young age? Finally, notice that in these views, God is made out to be an incomplete victor in His war against sin and death. Neither view is much of an alternative to the Reformed one, which after all has a certain terrible logic to it.

The best solution I am aware of comes from the man C. S. Lewis regarded as his mentor (posthumously). George MacDonald’s view was that, because God created humans in such a way that our deepest yearnings are for communion with our Maker, God’s purposes would not – could not – be successful unless those children He made remembered where they belonged and eventually turned back homeward. God is the Great Physician who heals all our diseases, even if they have penetrated deep into our wills and desires. Inasmuch as our wills are misshapen, God’s intention and chosen responsibility is to restore them, through what will undoubtedly be a painful process for all involved (this is MacDonald’s “hell”), but it will eventually be accomplished in all alike. As the greatest and highest objective Goodness, God is wholly and utterly lovely to all He has made. He has never made a soul that could become so blind as to be utterly incapable of recognizing Him as Father, and MacDonald doubted to the extreme that there ever existed a soul that would not be irresistibly drawn to Him and His goodness once it did recognize Him. Our wills are bound, bound by our biology, bound by our cultures, habits, and prejudices: what else would a loving Father do but make every effort to free His children from that bondage? “The will of God should be done. Man should be free—not merely man as he thinks of himself, but man as God thinks of him.” Neither a final death (annihilationism in its various forms) nor eternal death (an eternal hell) would be acceptable to God, because it is Death, not the wayward will of one of His children, still less His child itself, that is truly His enemy; He intends to put Death under His feet once and for all, swallowing it up in Life that He may be all in all.

Conceptions of salvation, beliefs about the fate of the damned, and interpretations of biblical eschatology — as nearly all doctrines — have tolerated variations and fluctuations throughout church history, but what has remained a constant underpinning of Christianity is an understanding of God as quintessentially good, loving, and just. For my part, I cannot reconcile the latter bedrock assumption with any of the views discussed above except that of MacDonald. While I cannot claim certainty that his stance is true, I find it to be the least damaging to the character of God as understood by Christians throughout the ages, and with him I believe that God would rather us think the best of His character as reflected in that majority Christian testimony than doggedly defend the factuality of every depiction of Him we can find in the Bible.

Moreover, if the problem of pain, which is probably every bit as much responsible for strife, heartache, and savage acts of sin as it is a result of them, has any solution, it’s in a God who will emerge as the victor over suffering by conquering it and redeeming it for the good of everyone He allowed to endure it. Scoff if you like, but my heart was restless until it found its rest in this God, and I will cling to that hope until my dying breath.

I am more convinced than ever that many Christians suffer from a massive misunderstanding of the nature of justice.

Now for the record, I’m no Rob Bell groupie (I’ve never read anything he’s written), and I certainly don’t intend to critique any and every critique of him or his ideas. Nor do I want this to come off as an endorsement of soteriological inclusivism or universalism, but as a plea for a reevaluation of what justice means.

To begin with, this “remake” of the infamous Love Wins promo video (the makers insist that they don’t intend to parody) illustrates the problem well.

Source: YouTube

First, I’d like to thank those involved for the spirit in which this video was made. If there’s nothing else to commend it, I can at least be happy that it’s not so appallingly smarmy like that one popular parody many of us have seen (which I won’t even bother linking to here).

It starts off by turning Rob Bell’s question about Gandhi around: whereas Bell asked how right it would be for God to condemn a good man like Gandhi, this video asks how right it would be for God to let Hitler off the hook. I’m beginning to think that Godwin’s Law deserves a corollary: ”As a discussion of non-exclusivistic soteriology grows longer, the probability of an appeal to emotion regarding Hitler approaches 1.” Call it the Lovewins Law.

The video goes on to ask how the bad things that those of us who aren’t genocidal maniacs do can legitimately be distinguished from the acts of genocidal maniacs. On that, all I have to say is that if your system of thought gives parity to the life of a decent yet non-Christian teenager killed in a car-wreck and the life of Hitler, it’s up for examination during the next common sense audit. But that’s part of the problem with this video: it pulls Hitler out as a trump card, but then tries to argue that to God, we’re all as bad as Hitler, which of course makes it useless as a trump card.

Many objectors to universalism, like the makers of the above video, do so on the grounds that the victims of evil acts, such as Holocaust victims, must be vindicated if God is going to show Himself just. This is an appeal to our almost unavoidable emotions, especially anger, toward wrongdoers. Hey, if someone were to kill my family and I had the immediate chance to kill him in response, I’m the first to admit that I’d probably not be able to avoid doing just that, and probably as cruelly and as painfully as I was able to. It’s part of our instincts, a social defense mechanism that’s no doubt played into our survival as a species: eliminate even small-scale offenders for large-scale protection.

So don’t get me wrong: wanting to make sure that offenders pay is understandable. It’s completely human. And I mean completely: it’s not divine.

It should be a dead give-away that the predominating view of justice is somewhat askew when we see the line blurred in all sorts of TV and movies by troubled characters trying to get back at wrongdoers and justifying their actions by saying, “It’s not revenge. It’s justice.” The very fact that the lines are so blurry suggests that we should rethink it. Is there a substantive difference between revenge and justice?

One of the first factors people will suggest to distinguish the two is motive: we should prosecute perpetrators impartially and according to the law (=justice), not because we’re angry about what they’ve done (=revenge). But what’s the motivation for good justice? “Well, to stop offenders from hurting others and discourage harmful behavior.” I ask you: what does this have to do with the afterlife? Is God worried that a redeemed Adolph might not be able to resist the urge to pull wings off of heavenly butterflies (or angels…yeah, that’s probably it)? “Ok then, to comfort the victims.” And this is different from outsourced revenge how?

I used to think that pursuing a justice system that sought to reform rather than punish criminals was solely the interest of out-of-touch Woodstock left-overs. But now, even though I still have doubts about the corrigibility of many people and the ability of our current structures to truly reform them, I at least understand the motivation better. A truly impartial justice system should ensure that the desire for vengeance on the part of the victims or the victims’ loved ones does not eliminate our attempts to restore them and heal the holes in their souls that caused their destructive behavior. As MacDonald wrote, “Suppose my watch has been taken from my pocket; I lay hold of the thief; he is dragged before the magistrate, proved guilty, and sentenced to a just imprisonment: must I walk home satisfied with the result? Have I had justice done me? The thief may have had justice done him—but where is my watch?”

If we have to keep wrongdoers locked away in the interest of public safety or to deter crime, it’s a concession we have to make as humans. But God’s not a human.

Or is He only a bigger, better human? Is He, as C. S. Lewis believed, a slave to some “deep magic” that cries out, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth — unless you can get some perfect, sinless guy to come along and lose his eye or tooth for you”? Jesus did not seem to think so: he weighed the lex talionis and, for all the balance implied (it’s not an eye plus a $100 fine for an eye, after all), found it wanting, because it does not get to the root of the problems that cause our hurtful sins. We as humans (especially as victims) find it impossible to be objective about what those who do wrong deserve.

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Who, then, would be in the best position to understand all the environmental and internal factors that would warp the mind and will of a child who delights in painting pictures for his mother into an adult who destroys millions of children and mothers — who other than that person’s Creator? If He is not an impartial judge, we are all in trouble; but if He is, and He chooses to heal all our diseases, casting aside our sins as far as the east is from the west, who can say that His justice is deficient, even if it means that our desire for revenge against the Hitlers of the world is thwarted?

The question is not mercy vs. justice: it’s love versus revenge. Justice can never be about revenge. My hope is that God’s overwhelming, all-consuming righteousness will be revealed in His scandalous mercy.

Sometime during the meandering introduction to the sermon this past Sunday, my five-year-old son turned to me and whispered, “What is hell?”

The service suddenly got a lot more interesting. I don’t think anyone had said anything about hell in that service. But that’s my son: a chip off the old blockhead.

Deep breath. “We’ll talk about it later, ok?” It’s not like he could expect me to explain that subject on the spot, right? Right in the middle of the service! But regardless, I considered, I should take this quiet time to gather my thoughts.

Then I realized I needed to answer another question first: what do I believe about hell?

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I have said a lot of things on my blog lately in defense of universalism. So am I a universalist? Well, right now, I’m confident enough that I should defend it against the bum rap it’s been given, and although I’m not confident enough to decide on that question myself (much less to proclaim it as truth), my heart is there.

But even if I do accept universalism, does that answer the question about hell? Most Christian universalists throughout church history have believed in hell. So I still had to answer my son’s question. What do I believe about hell?

At this point, I believe that hell is where we are separated from God. I do not believe that it is a place God sends us to in order to make us pay for our sins (which can never be done, so it drags on and on and on and on…), or a death sentence that will satisfy His sense of justice, or His chosen method of getting rid of those stubborn souls who won’t tell Him how awesome He is. If it’s locked, it’s locked from the inside, as Lewis said, emphasizing that those who stay there are not bound there against their wills. “Separation from God as a result of sin” struck me as a very ecumenical definition of hell that I can find a lot of sympathy for.

In fact, it reminded me of something…something very recent…

Then it hit me. And instead of waiting until after the service, I thought I might be able to give him a starting place in some quietly whispered words.

“Remember this morning when your little sister was screaming and acting really hatefully? She wouldn’t let Mommy or Daddy help her pick out her clothes or do anything for her, and when I tried to talk sweetly to her and hug her, she just kept screaming at me?”

“Yes.” Trust me — we hadn’t seen a meltdown like that one in a very long time. We were late for church because of it.

“Remember what we did? Mommy and Daddy shut her in her room and let her scream until she got it all out and realized how bad it was to treat everyone that way. It didn’t take long for her to realize it, and when we let her out a couple minutes later, she was better, and she really acted very sweet, didn’t she?”

A thoughtful nod.

“That’s what hell is like…”

He perked up, realizing that I wasn’t just reminiscing, but answering his question about hell. “You mean Satan’s world?” Oh man, the dualistic Sunday School teachers have already gotten to him. Undeception has to begin at home, I guess.

“That’s one way people think about it. But what I am talking about is when people who hate God and act mean to everyone die, and God sends them to a place where they can understand how badly they acted and remember how much He loves them and how much they miss and need Him. It’s a really sad place. We call that place hell. Do you know what I mean?”

Another nod. This time he leaned against me, satisfied. For now.

Like I said, just a starting point – and I’m certainly not at the end of my own journey. Perhaps the best part was that I didn’t have to answer my own lingering question: whether every sinner will ultimately leave his or her “room” and enter communion with God. But at least I’ve planted a view of God that my young son can understand.

It wasn’t a view he would have found reflected in the pastor’s sermon about the “gospel” as defined by penal substitution theory, I hate to say. But he didn’t really listen to the sermon anyway.

I just wish the rest of the congregation had been so lucky.