Oct
10
Universalism and Salvation
I have been reading the book Hell Under Fire, eds. Christopher W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson. I highly recommend it. One of the chapters is written by noted Anglican theologian J.I. Packer, in which he addresses the theology of universalism, especially in relation to the eternal destiny of those who do not “accept Jesus” in this life. Below, I have pieced together portions of this chapter that I hope will sufficiently explain what “universalism” is and its understanding of the Christian gospel and salvation.
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“A universalist is someone who believes that every human being whom God has created or will create will finally come to enjoy the everlasting salvation into which Christians enter here and now. Universalism is the recognized name for this belief….
Among Christian theological options it appears as an extreme optimism of grace, or perhaps of nature, and sometimes, it seems, of both. But in itself it is a revisionist challenge to orthodoxy, whether Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant evangelical; for the church has officially rated universalism a heresy ever since the second Council of Constantinople (the fifth ecumenical council, A.D. 553), when the doctrine of apokatastasis (the universal return of God and restoration of all souls) that Origen taught was anathematized.
In recent years universalism has made a remarkable comeback among mainstream Christian thinkers, and it cannot now be dismissed out of hand as a foolish fantasy in the way it once could. It is, as we will see, the most audacious of modern views about human destiny, yet it is almost certainly the one most widely held among Christian people in the West, at both popular and academic levels….
Most universalists (granted, not all) concede that universalism is not clearly taught in the Bible; what then is the warrant for the universalist confidence? It seems plain that the deepest motivation in their minds has always been revolt against mainstream belief in endless punishment in hell for some people…. Motivationally, then, universalists are at one, but not in substantive theology. Far from it! On closer inspection, universalism dissolves into a cluster of distinct universalisms….
What our survey of the variety of universalisms (which is by no means exhaustive) points to is the fact that (1) the various universalisms are corollaries or spin-offs of other beliefs about God and/or man, and that (2) universalism in all its forms is a human wish seeking a divine warrant. What holds universalists together is a shared sense of embarrassment, indeed outrage, at the thought of a loving God ever excluding anyone from final happiness, rather than any common mind as to what that happiness includes and how today’s unbelievers worldwide will reach it….
When universalists affirm the salvation of all, they are clearly intending to use the word in its full Christian sense. So let us remind ourselves of what that is. Salvation, in Scripture as in life, is the process, or outcome, of being saved: that is, being rescued from jeopardy and misery, preserved and kept safe from evil and disaster, protected against hostile forces, and thus firmly established in a state of security. The Bible focuses throughout on God as the One who saves, and on needy humans as beneficiaries of his saving action….
This Christian salvation has three tenses — past, present, and future. Believers have been saved from sin’s penalty, are being saved from its power, and will one day be saved from its presence, for when we are glorified there will be no sin either in us or in our environment. At each stage, salvation centers on, and is mediated through, a personal relation that constitutes its very heart, namely: (1) faith-and-love fellowship with the Father and his Son, Jesus Christ, in adoring gratitude for what has been given so far and in expectant hope for more to come; and (2) a relation supernaturally created and sustained in the present by the Holy Spirit, one that it seems will last forever. And as it will not be an isolated experience but a continuous one, so it will not be an experience in isolation but a communal involvement with a countless host, enjoying their togetherness as they enjoy their communion with the Savior, who loves each of them separately (cf. Gal. 2:20) within his love for his church as a whole (cf. Eph. 5:25).
The first critical question in our assessment is this: Do universalists really understand salvation in these terms? To answer it, we must distinguish three different sorts of universalism that modern minds entertain. We label them secular salvationism, postmortem salvationism, and pluralist salvationism.
Secular salvationism contends that the destination everyone will share after he or she has died is not conceived in a way that includes the elements in the biblical gift of salvation as specified above. This corresponds with Hollywood’s fantasy-laden dreams of happy futures for all departed ones. Note also Hosea Ballou (1771-1852), who taught that everyone dies into some sort of happiness. Under his leadership ‘the Universalist Church threw out the doctrines of the Trinity, the deity of Christ, original sin and the need for conversion.’…
All constructions in which loving communion with the Father and the Son by the Spirit and unending praise and gratitude for redemption are not central are mere pagan fantasies. So we label them secular and strike them out of our reckoning.
Postmortem salvationism is the belief that after death God will deal savingly with all who, for whatever reason, left this world without faith in Christ. Their Creator will carry out a procedure that has been described as eschatological evangelization. He will confront them with their sin and set before them the Christ of the gospel, and he will continue to do this till they turn to Christ in repentance and faith and so qualify to join the great company of saints and angels who are already worshiping on the true Mount Zion (Heb. 12:22-24). How exactly God will do that is variously explained…. In contrast to the secular salvationists, they work with a fully Christian idea of final salvation, and that is what concerns us at this moment.
By contrast, pluralist salvationism is deeply problematical with regard to the meaning of salvation. [Pluralism] is the venturesome assertion that plurality — that is, a range and variety of thoughts, beliefs, ideals, convictions, hypotheses, and points of view on a subject, or of cultural and religious life-patterns and value-systems overlapping or in parallel — is good, because all these different views have real validity and so the mix of them is enriching….
The best-known Western exponent [is] John Hick…. [P]artway through his career as a philosophy teacher, having already committed himself to universalism for purposes of theodicy within a broadly Christian frame, John Hick embraced religious pluralism — that is, the view that, so far from Christianity being the one true faith, all major religions are essentially on a par, sharing a generic transcendent unity, which now Hick set himself to identify…. For Hick, as a pluralist, [the Jesus of orthodox Christianity] is a myth, not a fact, and final salvation, whatever its nature, is as accessible through other faiths with other myths as it is through historic Christianity. Hick’s formula was that all will ultimately achieve the ideal of Real-centeredness “through a gradual, and at times painful, therapeutic and purgatorial process continuing beyond this life (according to Hick’s later work, perhaps through several others), and leading eventually to the conformity of the person to what Christian tradition has called the ‘divine likeness.’…
Hick brought this universalism with him when he moved into pluralism, but the jettisoning of his Christian ontology — a real incarnate personal Savior, a real triune koinonia as the reality of God, a real atonement, reconciliation, justification and adoption through Christ, and a real new creation in union with Christ — leaves his salvation talk without any clear content at all. If it ever was the Christian salvation that he had in view, it is not so now. So at this point we rule pluralist salvationism out of our reckoning, just as a moment ago we ruled out secular salvationism. Both are charitable but unbiblical and indeed antibiblical dreams, nothing more.”
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I hope someone finds this a helpful summary. I will likely follow up in the near future with another selection or two from Packer’s contribution to the Hell Under Fire book, as I found it quite interesting and helpful myself. Cheers!
