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?

This is a companion piece to another post of mine, “We might not like it, but it’s in the Bible, so…”

Occasionally I see people back away from their theological hunches, or at least decide to remain agnostic about them, because try as they might they just can’t see “where the Bible teaches it.” The starting point for them is this: The Bible is our necessary, inviolable source for ascertaining truth about God. What it says, goes. Thank heavens we know exactly what it says! They call this a biblical faith.

My good friend Drew Smith stumbled across a post by Angela Shier-Jones at The Kneeler speaking about her philosophical faith, which resonated with me, especially given some recent conversations on this blog. This is almost precisely what I’ve been noticing about my own faith lately, with its roots in the Bible but its trunk and branches reaching and spreading into the air above it.

As a Christian who, although rejecting inerrancy, still loves and feeds on the Bible, I realize that above all it offers important glimpses into the mind of men grappling with the things of God. I value Scripture as I value all church tradition, because the Bible is simply the earliest instance of church tradition available, codified by later church tradition, and hardly less fallible. But for bringing us to meet God, the Bible is uncommonly valuable, so much so that I find it tragic that so many believers could have been led into the company of Jesus by the Bible and then found it necessary to throw out some of the insights gained by the illumination of the fire that he started, just because it wasn’t strictly “scriptural”, i.e. it didn’t sound enough like the glimpses of men of old that are recorded in Scripture. Those men may have written something deemed by later men to deserve inclusion in the Bible, and a few of them may have even known Jesus when he was here, but in their time they could not have benefited from the stream of understanding that has developed through the ages from the seed of truth they planted.

Moreover, as eloquently pointed out by Thom Stark, they themselves set the precedent for this dynamic wrestling with the problematic theologies of their contemporaries and forbears that occasionally shows through in entire books of the Bible: in Thom’s words, the Bible is an argument with itself. How can we simply trust that the arguments ever got settled within the canon we have? Who settled it? Where is their consensus ratified for our use? The closest thing we have, in my understanding, is that “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all,” and even that isn’t “proved” by Scripture. But the hope is sparked there, and in hope we go on to shine that light wherever something our God-seeking conscience considers darkness is imputed to God or His ways, even when that darkness is something one or more of the authors of Scripture believed.

Rather than a definitive end to theological arguments or clearly ringing pronouncement of unquestionable truths, the Bible instead sets a trajectory of understanding about God that does not land within its pages. Shier-Jones in her blog post put it this way (in the form of a prayer):

How sad that religion so often decries the great gift you give to us of collective intelligence, of the progress of knowledge and the slow but inexorable maturing of the mind of humanity. How pathetic when priests, the appointed guardians of the mysteries, perjure their calling by insisting that they already know what the truth is, that we need look no further, seek no harder. We can stop asking and stop knocking at your door because you have already said all you intend to say. The Bible says it all, and what it says is all that we need to know.

Thank you God – that you taught me better than to believe that!

The Bible is your word – but it is not your final word…

There is much in the Bible that does not teach, and even much which disallows, human evolution, which is hands-down the best explanation for the similarities and diversities in the biological forms on this planet. The same thing goes for universalism: only a few passages can be found to support it in Scripture, and there are certainly passages that contradict it, but at least in this case the germ of understanding about God and His nature that blossoms into and nourishes universalism is easily found within Scripture, and in certain places our glimpses into the heart of the Bible’s authors suggest that it had already begun to sprout there.

When I viewed Francis Chan’s recent video, I was annoyed by his suggestion that we should not try to understand God outside of strictly biblical considerations, since we are only like clay to the Potter: “Our only hope,” says Chan, “is that He would reveal to us what He is like, and then we can just repeat those things.” He goes on to show that he thinks God has done so, within the pages of Scripture alone. Rather than literally “only hope”, I suppose he meant, “only hope for knowing with certainty,” but the distinction between those two things are lost on most inerrantists, it seems. If that was our only hope, quite simply, we’d be SOL.

I initially decided I’d let the Apostle George respond to Chan, but a friend reading that post was not convinced. What makes us think, he wondered, that we can impose our ideals upon God? Although it may perhaps be an imposition upon God to say that He must be a certain way because we would like this or that to be the case, this is not the same as applying more factors than proof-texts to our understanding of who He is and what He is like, and weighing other interpretations of Him against those factors. Everyone applies their own reasoning and presuppositions when reading the Bible, of course, but most don’t acknowledge it, and will even condemn it when they see it in others. MacDonald’s insight was that we owe it to the one we worship to self-consciously apply the best of our experience and reason to understand Him, and not simply parrot the prevailing doctrines, even when gleaned from Scripture.

It’s the conscious application of this variety of factors that makes this approach more satisfactory than pretending we’re not “imposing” anything on God when we string bunches of scriptural testimony together, shrug our shoulders, and say, “Well, I guess that settles it; I guess acting monstrously can be just, and showing vindictive spite can be the reflex of love.” We can’t just point to this or that Scripture that describes God doing manifestly evil things like ordering the violent deaths of men, women, and children or (ostensibly) torturing people for eternity and let those instances predominate over our beliefs about what “goodness” means as it applies to God. We must steadfastly avoid placing every insight from nature or from philosophy under the subjection of our even more fallible patchwork quilt of sola scriptura theology, especially when the resultant position makes God out to be essentially unworshippable.

If God has indeed used Scripture to birth something real within our hearts and minds, let’s trust Him to bring us where it leads rather than cutting it down and using it as mulch for some doctrine of our own, based as it usually is in the often underdeveloped and immature understanding of those who went before us! I’m not advocating a “chronological snobbery” (Lewis’s phrase) that assumes everything before us was wrong and everything modern is right, but neither should we commit the opposite error of supposing that “greater things than these” can never be done by those who meet God for themselves. Surely an all-out trust in God as a fundamentally good person, as best we understand “good” with all the available data weighed judiciously, is preferable to letting slavish adherence to orthodoxy stand in for a faith that could mature both our souls and our understanding of God.

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.

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?

Image via Wikipedia

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.

Knee-Jerk Reaction Alert

• When you hear “universalism”, do not automatically think “there is no hell,” or “God is a soft touch who winks at sin.” Be aware that there are many versions of universalism, many with excellent ancient pedigrees, and most which do not maintain that punishment for sin is unnecessary, but that it is restorative rather than retributive.

• Some believers are convinced that justice and God’s dominion over sin and death cannot be satisfied until every sinner is made right with God.

• The vast majority of Christians who are universalistic in hope if not confidence believe that God will reconcile humanity to Himself specifically through Christ. These universalists don’t claim less for Jesus’ work, but more: total victory over sin, death, and the grave. Fears that Jesus will be left in the lurch or rendered irrelevant are overblown in the extreme.

• If you fear for evangelism, bear in mind that universalists have a message that they can take more joy in spreading around and that is more likely to stir up glad-hearted worship of God’s nature than endless declarations of an ill-tempered judge with a tiny loophole; most universalists also think there are plenty of reasons for avoiding hell, even if it is not eternal.

For more on popular misconceptions about universalism, please consult this informative article by Robin Parry, a self-described “evangelical universalist”.

This has been a public service announcement.

I’m very much disturbed to see how often it is that Christians are so devoutly interested in upholding their scriptures that they don’t mind if either God or neighbor gets black and blue in the process.

The trick to being an evangelical these days seems to be the willingness to maintain that evil is not necessarily evil when it comes to God. Besmirching His character under the ironic cover of defending God, what passes for good Christian apologetics is actually much more of a defense of prized doctrines such as inerrancy or Augustinian/Reformed soteriology than the only thing worth defending, viz. God’s character. Defending both our carefully constructed doctrines and God’s character cannot always be done simultaneously because they are often at loggerheads (or else many popular apologists would be without a job). Slick, ear-tickling apologetics serve the much-in-demand function of reassuring people that the Bible is everything they think it needs to be in order for their faith to remain comfortable and unquestionable.

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a more successful result if someone were consciously trying to relieve Christians of their responsibility to grow up into mature men and women of God. Unlike what I wanted to believe long ago, I do not find it so easy to believe that the truth can be discerned by looking for “that than which nothing more counterintuitive can be conceived.” Now I am convinced that we need to be willing to question things that conflict with our conscience. In some cases, we may have to disagree with Scripture; in many others, we may find that we have simply been forcing something unnatural onto the text.

Regarding the atrocities of the Canaanite conquest: do you think it’s better to worship a God whose morality requires exceptions and redefinitions of key concepts than to live with the uncertainty that perhaps even the biblical authors were not fully aware of the depths of God’s grace? Are you content to excuse even the worst charges against God if by any means it vindicates your Bible and the comfortable theological confidence it gives you?

Regarding the destiny of unbelievers: are you willing to accept lying down the damnation of your unbelieving brothers and sisters, shrugging it off with a mere, “Like it or not, that’s what the Bible says”? Forgetting the examples of Moses and Paul, are you content to cling to that ill-founded defense in assurance that your own fate is secured? Search your heart: are you nursing a strong prejudice against the idea of inclusivistic or universalistic Christianity in order to ensure the relevance of your religion’s special claims? I beg you to reconsider your priorities. As with the brutalities described in the Old Testament, if the Bible truly does unequivocally aver that some souls can never be recovered (which I doubt), it should be the fervent hope of every lover of God that the Bible is wrong about it. Where is the passion for what is right and compassionate that motivated the characters of Job, Abraham, Moses, the prophets, and Paul to contend with their Maker over their understanding of His words? “The Bible says it” simply isn’t good enough.

I’ll be blunt: Holy Scripture or “historic, orthodox” doctrines notwithstanding, the only way God is worth worshiping is if He’s good and loving through and through. I will not subjugate love to scarcely warranted glory or petty retribution disguised as justice. My faith is in a God whose soul is more lovely than ours, who has a higher, more wholesome sense of love and justice than we are able to walk in as humans. My hope is built on nothing less than this!