Justin Taylor's Blog, page 31

The Greatest Foreword Writer in the History of the Christian Church

To my knowledge, no one keeps tabulation on the number of Christians who have written forewords. But I imagine few have been more prolific at this task than J. I. Packer. And I am certain that few, if any, have done it so well.

To pick a random example, here is the latest Packer foreword I have read, commending and introducing a 2002 popular-level book by Paul Spilsbury entitled The Throne, The Lamb and the Dragon: A Reader’s Guide to the Book of Revelation (IVP). It is classic Packer, packing his words carefully to give a summer of the book of Revelation and then explaining what this book attempts to do with it, all with enthusiasm but not hyperbole.

The Revelation to John is a visionary circular to churches in Asia Minor that announces itself as a book of prophecy.

Basic to it are the seven letters of assessment, admonition and encouragement that the Lord Jesus dictated to John, and that now make up chapters 2 and 3.

Each letter ends with a promise of ultimate glory for everyone who “overcomes” in the approaching conflicts.

Next comes a long series of visions—by turns fantastic, grotesque, horrific and sublime—in which all Christians are martyrs, all humanity tastes God’s wrath, and all the beauties of new heaven, new heaven and new Jerusalem are outlined.

Hymns of praise hold it all together in a kaleidoscope that is as deeply devotional as it is disturbing.

This is an apocalypse, of a kind that Jewish imaginations—Scripture-soaked, theologically fueled, disaster-driven—were producing long before Christ.

It is a picture book in which all the pictures are theological symbols, and some are pictures explaining other pictures.

Since we do not write such works today, interpreting Revelation became a sort of Christian puzzle corner, especially in the West where dispensational hermeneutics and millennial dreams made the brew headier.

But that should now be a thing of the past.

Older interpreters would identify “the scarlet woman” with the papacy, and from there work back over past history and forward to some form of millennium. Such views still exist. But scholarship has moved into a new era of apocalyptic appreciation, and Paul Spilsbury has creamed off much of its wisdom to nourish ordinary Bible lovers.

His work delights me, and not just because he is a former student of mine; he has got the hang of the book, and is on the right track with it all the way. (Whether I agree with every sentence is neither here nor there.) There are huge benefits to be gained from what he has written, and I heartily commend it.

Packer is also the master of the short theological biography—able to take the measure of a man, painting a concise and compelling picture. Here he is in 1985 describing D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

What a fascinating human being he was! Slightly built, with a great domed cranium, head thrust forward, a fighter’s chin and a grim line to his mouth, he radiated resolution, determination, and an unwillingness to wait for ever. A very strong man, you would say, and you would be right. You can sense this from any photograph of him, for he never smiled into the camera.

There was a touch of the old-fashioned about him: he wore linen collars, three-piece suits, and boots in public, spoke on occasion of crossing-sweepers and washerwomen, and led worship as worship was led a hundred years before his time.

In the pulpit he was a lion, fierce on matters of principle, austere in his gravity, able in his prime to growl and to roar as his argument required.

Informally, however, he was a delightfully relaxed person, superb company, twinkling and witty to the last degree. His wit was as astringent as it was quick and could leave you feeling you had been licked by a cow. . . .

For he was a saint, a holy man of God: a naturally proud person whom God made humble; a naturally quick-tempered person to whom God taught patience; a naturally contentious person to whom God gave restraint and wisdom; a natural egoist, conscious of his own great ability, whom God set free from self-seeking to serve the servants of God.

Or here is his description of Francis Schaeffer:

He was physically small, with a bulging forehead, furrowed brow, and goatee beard. Alpine knee-breeches housed his American legs, his head sank into his shoulders, and his face bore a look of bright abstraction. Nothing special there, you would think; a serious, resolute man, no doubt, maybe a bit eccentric, but hardly unique on that account.

When he spoke, his English though clear was not elegant, and his voice had no special charm; British ears found it harsh, and if stirred he would screech from the podium in a way that was hard to enjoy.

Nevertheless, what he said was arresting, however he might look or sound while saying it. It had firmness, arguing vision; gentleness, arguing strength; simple clarity, arguing mental mastery; and compassion, arguing an honest and good heart. There was no guile in it, no party narrowness, no manipulation, only the passionate persuasiveness of the prophet who hurries in to share with others what he himself sees.

For those who want to grow in clear writing and clear thinking, reading Packer regularly would be a good idea.

Why It’s Hard to Have a Conversation Online about Social Justice and the Gospel

I like definitions, and I like distinctions. Without them, conversations get confused and muddled.

That’s why I liked posts like this from Jared Wilson.

He identifies two major views—call them the Pro–Social Justice side and the Anti–Social Justice side—and four subsets within each one:

Side A – Pro Social Justice

Faithful evangelicals who believe social justice in relation to the gospel simply refers to the general interpersonal obedience of loving one’s neighbor and may include corporate or systemic categories. It also may — or may not — refer to seeking legislative/governmental influence in providing for the welfare of the needy.
Faithful evangelicals who believe social justice in relation to the gospel refers to both general interpersonal obedience of love and governmental institution of policies related to care for the needy.
Religious folks of different persuasions who (unfortunately) genuinely affirm the social gospel.
Secular leftists who openly advocate socialism or Marxism, etc.

Side B – Anti Social Justice

Faithful evangelicals who believe the only justice the Bible speaks of that is bearing on Christians today is interpersonal fairness with each other, and that primarily and overwhelmingly justice should be spoken of in relation to Christ’s satisfaction of the wages of sin at the cross.
Faithful evangelicals who may or may not be concerned about so-called “social justice” issues but who are largely concerned about the misuse of corporate or systemic categories to refer to sin or justice and who are concerned about the appeal to governmental or legislative remedies specifically.
Religious folks of different persuasions who oppose social justice-related issues through genuine affirmation of radical individualism, etc.
Rightists who openly advocate white supremacy, ethnic nationalism, etc. (And also online trolls, frequently but not always anonymous, who may or may not purport to have a religious affiliation.)

Wilson writes:

There are more subsets of folks in each side, and there is admittedly some overlap between some of the subcategories, but those are, as I see it, the 8 major categories of folks trying to have this “conversation” with each other.

But then he goes on to show why the conversation is often unproductive:

Aside from the obvious problem of different motivations and foundations even within our own “side,” here is another problem this breakdown has demonstrated in practice: people tend to borrow ideas or even spokespeople from subcategories within their side to advance their own argument, which causes even more confusion.

For example, you will see folks from A1 quoting writers from A3 or A4 to make their case. Those quotes may not be anything egregious in themselves, but the source material or context can be, opening A1 folks up to the charge that they are advancing Marxism.

Similarly, I regularly see folks from B1 and B2 buddying up with folks from B4, and even if they are finding common ground in opposing social justice, the impression can be given that B1 and B2 don’t have much problem with B4’s advocacy of a white ethnostate, arguments that non-white races are mentally inferior, that chattel slavery was a blessing for the enslaved, and that any and every evangelical institutional leader is a cuck, a soyboy, or whatever stupid insult they’ve cooked up in their 4Chan basement lately.

A post like this may not change which “side” you are on. But it can help clarify what you are saying, what you are hearing, and why many are talking past each other.

I’d encourage you to read the whole thing, as he goes on to explain some of the things he thinks we should do in light of this.

Affirmations and Denials on Gender and Ministry in the Church

This is a helpful set of affirmations and denials from The Village Church in Texas:

We affirm that both men and women have been created in the image of God and are entitled to the privileges and held accountable to the responsibilities that come with reflecting our Creator.

We deny that either gender has been given or is entitled to greater dignity in society, the home, the church or the kingdom of God.

We affirm that both men and women are needed and necessary for the health and ministry of the church. Godly men and women should be visible partners in the corporate life of the church, deploying their diverse gifts for the good of the body. Simply put, all Christians contribute to the ministry of the church.

We deny that the church can flourish without brotherly/ sisterly partnership. We deny that a church can exist in which the men flourish and the women do not, or vice versa.

We affirm that the role/function of elder is reserved for qualified men. Elders are distinctly responsible for overseeing the church (1 Tim. 5:17; Titus 1:7; 1 Pet. 5:1–2) and preaching the Word (1 Tim. 3:2; 2 Tim. 4:2; Titus 1:9).

We deny that the role of elder being withheld from women diminishes their importance or their influence in the church. The indispensable help women were created to give can and should be exercised in all manner of roles/offices in the church, excepting those reserved for qualified men.

We affirm that all members of the church should be in glad submission to the elder body, and that all should be in glad and sacrificial submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, the Head of the Church.

We deny that all women are subject to the leadership and authority of all men. Further, biblical submission is not indicative of subordination or inequality, as seen in the Son’s submission to the Father (Phil. 2:1–11).

We affirm that complementarianism, rightly practiced, will lead to the recognizable flourishing of both sexes.

We deny any version of complementarianism or theological position that leads to the subjugation, abuse or neglect of any man or woman. We strongly denounce any distorted view of Scripture that contributes to the belief that biblical manhood or womanhood includes or permits practices such as marginalization, subjugation, intimidation, neglect or any form of abuse.

We affirm that all men and women have been created in the image of God, whether single or married.

We deny that single men and women must be married to be meaningful participants in the corporate life of the church. We deny that single men possess any authority over single women. The way that they love and serve their sisters should not patronize, victimize or show force, but rather should be the fruit of brotherly love, and vice versa.

You can read online a short version or a long, detailed, exegetical version of their philosophy on the role of women in their church.

How Should Christians Think about Taking Medicine for Depression?

From an article on depression by Ed Welch:

The severe pain of depression makes you welcome anything that can bring relief.

For some people, medication brings relief from some symptoms.

Most family physicians are qualified to prescribe appropriate medications. If you prefer a specialist, get a recommendation for a psychiatrist, and ask these questions of your doctor and pharmacist:

How long will it take before it is effective?

What are some of the common side effects?

And, if your physician is prescribing two medications, will it be difficult to determine which medication is effective?

From a Christian perspective, the choice to take medication is a wisdom issue. It is rarely a matter of right or wrong. Instead, the question to ask is, “What is best and wise?”

Wise people seek counsel (your physicians should be part of the group that counsels you).

Wise people approach decisions prayerfully.

They don’t put their hope in people or medicine but in the Lord.

They recognize that medication is a blessing, when it helps, but recognize its limits.

Medication can change physical symptoms, but not spiritual ones.

It might give sleep, offer physical energy, allow you to see in color, and alleviate the physical feeling of depression.

But it won’t answer your spiritual doubts, fears, frustrations, or failures.

If you choose to take medication, please consider letting a wise and trusted person from your church walk come along side of you. They can remind you that God is good, that you can find power to know God’s love and love others, and, yes, that joy is possible, even during depression.

For more on Welch’s perspective, read the whole article, and see his books

Depression: Looking Up from the Stubborn Darkness
Blame It on the Brain? Distinguishing Chemical Imbalances, Brain Disorders, and Disobedience

The One Foolproof Way to Prevent a Broken Heart

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves:

To love at all is to be vulnerable.

Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.

If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.

Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries;

avoid all entanglements;

lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.

But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change.

It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

D. A. Carson on the (Ambiguous) Claim ‘This Is a Gospel Issue’

One of the reasons many people resonate with Kevin DeYoung’s writing is that he has a mind that likes to define terms and make distinctions. When that happens, fog begins to clear away among people of goodwill.

So, on the question, “Is social justice a gospel issue?” he avoids the easy answers of Yes or No and rightly responds: “That depends on what we mean by ‘social justice’ and what we mean by ‘gospel issue.’

Kevin’s article reminded me of a 2014 Themelios editorial by D. A. Carson. I wonder if we might be having more clear and productive conversations these days if we had taken to heart Carson’s careful definitional distinctions.

Carson argues that when we say “X is a gospel issue” we are doing two things at once:

We are making a truth claim.
We are making a polemical assertion in order to establish its relative importance.

On the “truth claim,” he writes:

The statement is a truth claim in that it asserts that something either is true about X, namely, that it is “a gospel issue.”

The claim is either valid (if X really is a gospel issue) or invalid (if X is really not a gospel issue).

But, he points out, most people who say “X is a gospel issue” are doing more than making a truth claim:

If the truth claim is valid, the statement implicitly asserts that X is a more important topic than others that are not gospel issues: it is designed to establish the importance of X relative to other topics that are not understood to be gospel issues.

What is presupposed in the statement, of course, is that the gospel has a very high level of importance, perhaps supreme importance, such that if X is a gospel issue, it too is similarly elevated in importance.

It follows, then, that to abandon X, when X is a gospel issue, is somehow to diminish or threaten the gospel. . . .

Carson goes on to argue that the meaning of “gospel issue” itself needs clarification.

On the one hand, because of the complex entanglements of theology, with a little imagination one might argue that almost any topic is a gospel issue. At one level or another, everything in any theology that is worth the name is tied to everything else, so it is possible to tie everything to the gospel. In that sense, well-nigh everything is a gospel issue. . . .

If that is all we are doing, the argument “X is a gospel issue” is a well-nigh useless argument, because the claim could be advanced for almost any topic, irrespective of that to which X refers. The choice of X will in that case reflect rather more the identity of the individual or group that is making the claim, than the persuasiveness of the argument.

On the other hand, “gospel issue” may continue to be a useful category if it refers not to any biblical or theological topic that can be tied in some way or other to the gospel—for the organic nature of biblical and theological truth demonstrates that just about every topic can be tied to the gospel—but to biblical and theological topics the denial of which clearly affect our understanding of the gospel adversely.

Carson makes three additional points in this discussion:

Clearly “X is a gospel issue” is a useless argument where there is little agreement as to what the gospel is. . . .
Some issues are very important but are not usefully labeled gospel issues. . . . [W]hen we decide to talk about the relative importance of topics, we need more than the formula “X is a gospel issue.” Issues may be hugely important even if they are not gospel issues. Indeed, if our only criterion is whether X is a gospel issue, then if we decide that X is not a gospel issue, we may unwittingly generate the impression it is not an important topic. It is always worth asking: Important for what? Important in what domain?
We must squarely face the fact that what we judge to be a gospel issue is shaped in part by our location in history, in a particular culture. In other words, the issues are not to be determined by logic alone. Our place in time and space entices us to evaluate whether a particular topic is a gospel issue; believers in another time and place might come to quite different conclusions, even though they share a common understanding of what the gospel is.

On this last point, he considers the question of race in America as an illustration:

Certainly the majority of Christians in America today would happily aver that good race relations are a gospel issue.

They might point out

that God’s saving purpose is to draw to himself, through the cross, men and women from every tongue and tribe and people and nation;

that the church is one new humanity, made up of Jew and Gentile;

that Paul tells Philemon to treat his slave Onesimus as his brother, as the apostle himself;

that this trajectory starts at creation, with all men and women being made in the image of God, and finds its anticipation in the promise to Abraham that in his seed all the nations of the earth will be blessed.

Moreover, the salvation secured by Christ in the gospel is more comprehensive than justification alone: it brings repentance, wholeness, love for brothers and sisters in the Christian community.

But the sad fact remains that not all Christians have always viewed race relations within the church as a gospel issue.

More worrying, survey after survey has shown that in America today, even among those with a robust grasp of the gospel, black Christians and white Christians do not view these matters exactly the same way. Even where both sides agree, on biblical grounds, that this is a gospel issue, black Christians are far more likely to see that this is a crucial gospel issue, an issue of huge importance, one that is often ignored, while white Christians are more likely to imagine that racial issues have so largely been resolved that it is a distraction to keep bringing them up.

In other words, even where both sides agree that we are dealing with a gospel issue (and in that sense, an important issue), they do not agree on the relative importance of this gospel issue. It is impossible not to see that our judgments on these matters are not shaped by Scripture alone, in the same sense in which a mathematician may be shaped by Pythagoras’s theorem. They are shaped by our relationships, by our race, by our culture, by where we have been brought up, by the income levels we have experienced, by the affronts we have experienced, and much more.

In other words, for many topics that we have designated X, whether X is a gospel issue is not a zero sum game.

The whole article is worth a careful rereading as we continue to discuss these important issues.

An Interview with the Author of the Definitive Treatment on Christian Universalism

Michael McClymond (PhD, University of Chicago) is professor of modern Christianity at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri. His latest work, The Devil’s Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism (Baker Academic, 2018), is a 1,300-page history and critique of universalism. Doug Sweeney calls it his “magnum opus . . . a tour de force of historical theology”‘ Gerald McDermott writes, “This tome by Michael McClymond is a theological bombshell”; Kevin Vanhoozer says, “Important issues require important books, and McClymond has produced what I suspect will be the definitive treatment of Christian universalism for years to come.”

The first-ever complete history of the doctrine of universal salvation, this massive work is a devastating demolition of the supposition that universalism can be sustained with exegetical or systematic integrity.”

Professor McClymond answered a few questions from me about the book and the issues.

I suppose the first thing to say—besides “Wow”—is “Congratulations” and “Thank you.” What a massive achievement. Your book runs to 540,000 words, covers 1,376 pages, and cites around 2,500 sources (in Greek, Latin, French, German, and English). The bibliography alone runs to 90 pages in small print and double columns. What was the motivation and the process for investing so much of your scholarly life into a definitive treatment of universalism?

Isn’t this the ultimate theological question—i.e., the scope of final salvation? What could matter more? And if there is truth in the New Testament contrast between “momentary, light affliction” and the “eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:17), then should not all Christian believers be deeply concerned with getting it right regarding these final outcomes?

I had first encountered the teaching on universal salvation in a New Testament course that I took as an undergraduate at Northwestern University. My attitude then (as now) was that the professor teaching the class certainly had the right to hold to universalism as a personal belief, but not to be teaching us that the apostle Paul taught universalism. (Simultaneously with that course, I was in a reading course with a professor of classics going through the Epistle to the Romans line by line.) So I became the pesky student in the back of the classroom who was often shooting up his hand.

When I later studied at Yale Divinity School, I wrote what proved—for me—to be a seminal essay comparing Origen and Karl Barth on the question of universalism.

I can’t say that I had universalism on the brain during the 1990s or early 2000s.

But several years ago what really surprised me was not Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins (2011), with its well-worn and hackneyed arguments. Instead, I was startled by the multitude of people I thereafter encountered holding that universalism was biblical and evangelical teaching. From my study of historical theology, I was well aware of the intense controversies in the early centuries over Origenism, and of the pushback against Karl Barth’s position on universal election from Emil Brunner and others in the 1950s. This seemed like a question worth exploring: How and why had attitudes changed so decisively in such a relatively short period of time on the crucial question of the scope of final salvation?

In what ways did Barth’s affirmation of universal election in Church Dogmatics II/2 help the train of universalism to begin accelerating?

Through studying the history of Christian universalism, and examining a large number of texts throughout the centuries, I concluded that ancient gnosis, Jewish Kabbalah, Christian Cabala, and Western esotericism played a decisive role in the development of universalism from ancient times up to the contemporary era. With the possible exception of some of the Anglo-American universalists in the late 1700s and early 1800s, this gnostic-kabbalist-esoteric tradition was central to Christian universalism. (Those skeptical of this claim should consult the book, which offers an abundance of evidence and citation—in nearly 4,000 footnotes.)

During the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the most overt Christian universalists were Russian thinkers such as Vladimir Solovyov, Nicholas Berdyaev, and Sergius Bulgakov—all of whom had been decisively influenced by Jakob Böhme and other thinkers of the Western esoteric tradition.

With Karl Barth in the 1940s, universalism seemed to be “skipping over” from esoteric thought into mainstream (or what I term exoteric) Christian theology.

Barth scholars are themselves divided as to whether Barth should or should not be seen as teaching universalism. Yet, on some level, this question of Barth exegesis does not matter much, since Church Dogmatics II/2 without any doubt made it much more acceptable among mainstream Protestant and Catholic thinkers to think of salvation as all-inclusive. John A. T. Robinson by 1950 was already affirming universalism, largely based on Barth’s premises. Hans Urs von Balthasar’s “hopeful universalism” was shaped by Barth’s writings, as Balthasar himself admitted. Apart from Barth’s massive influence on Christian theologians of all traditions in the mid- to late-20th century, it is hard to imagine that more recent thinkers such as Jürgen Moltmann would so confidently and unapologetically assert universal salvation.

In The Devil’s Redemption I analyze Barth’s biblical interpretation and seek to show that his defense of universal election is not supported exegetically. My question is not that of most other scholars—“Does universal election imply universal salvation?”—but the more basic one—“Why should anyone think that election is universal rather than particular?” When writing in the 1940s, Barth had essentially no precedent from earlier theological history for his assertion of universal election. So one has to ask: How could Barth be correct over and against all the earlier theologians? One must, I believe, adhere to a cult of theological genius to believe that a thinker who lived and wrote some 1,900 years after the completion of the biblical canon somehow “discovered” a major doctrine that no one had ever previously seen in the text of the New Testament. When one examines the particulars of Barth’s exegesis in Church Dogmatics II/2, one sees a lot of special pleading, and even some rather weird reasoning—though I would admit that Barth’s exegesis in various other parts of the Church Dogmatics has much to teach us.

Barth’s universal election doctrine does not allow him to accept the unique status of Israel as Yahweh’s “chosen people” in the Old Testament, and this leads him into some strange argumentation as he seeks to avoid the obvious implications of the texts.

Few theologians want to admit this point. It is intimidating to be up against Barth—not to mention all of the Barthians who fiercely defend their mentor’s name and reputation.

I should note that I appreciate Barth in many ways and have learned much from Barth, while at the same time I regard his advocacy of universal election as having been theologically disastrous for his own theological development and for the theological development of the global church since the 1950s and 1960s. Perhaps that sounds like a schizoid approach to the Old Man of Basel. But I cannot escape the feeling that the valuable things in the Church Dogmatics are intermingled with things dangerous. For me this means that Barth’s ideas can’t simply be gathered but must be continuously sifted.

In the 20th century, it seems to me that we would have thought of universalism as mainly a liberal, white, Protestant thing. But in the 21st century, this is no longer the case. How and why did universalism “go global”?

As your question correctly implied, the 20th century rise of universalism occurred in stages.

While Russian theology is not especially well known in the West, in the 20th century prior to World War II one would have to say that universalism was “a Russian thing” (e.g., Solovyov, Berdyaev, Bulgakov).

Then, yes, from the 1950s through the 1970s, one might say that universalism became a “liberal, white, Protestant thing.” Prior to Vatican II (1962–1965), one finds some private musings on the possibility of salvation for all among certain Catholic intellectuals (e.g., Jacques Maritain), although one does not find official Catholic spokespersons affirming universalism.

The next step in the process occurs in the 1970s and 1980s, as Catholics discussed the question of the “unchurched” while evangelicals debated the question of the “unevangelized”—two ways of framing the question of inclusivism. In today’s retrospect, these debates of a generation ago look like a transitional period. Balthasar’s book Dare We Hope? launched a new discussion of “hopeful universalism” among Catholics, leading into more overt affirmations of universalism later on. Similarly, the tentative suggestions by John Stott regarding conditionalism or annihilationism triggered intra-evangelical debates over the final scope of salvation.

From the 1990s onward, the theological leading edge has left inclusivism behind and has become fully engaged with universalism. From this point onward, universalism has become a “Catholic thing,” and purportedly also an “evangelical thing” and perhaps a “Pentecostal thing” too.

The issue of final salvation seems to be as much a live issue today as it ever has been. In March 2018 the reported statement of Pope Francis (as recorded by Francis’s atheistic journalist friend Scalfari) that “there is no hell” but rather “the disappearance of souls” gives the impression that the pontiff holds to annihilationism—a position that earlier Catholic scholars rejected.

Even more recently, in the aftermath of the Pennsylvania grand jury report on sex abuse (August 2018), and the media attention to the egregious misdeeds of Cardinal McCarrick, I have noticed essays appearing at websites appealing to conservative Catholics (e.g., First Things, National Catholic Register, LifeSiteNews, and so on) discussing the “four last things” (death, judgment, heaven, hell) and asking why today’s Catholic Church is not preaching these doctrines, and whether the clerical malefactors believe that they themselves are subject to God’s postmortem judgment. It is too early to tell, but the unfolding scandals might cause some Catholics to focus more attention on God’s judgment of human individuals and the question of final salvation.

In your book, you refer to universalism as the “opiate of the theologians.” What do you mean by that?

My phrase of course is an adaptation of a saying of Karl Marx, to the effect that religion is the “opiate of the masses” (though Marx’s original phrasing was slightly different). The point I wish to make is that universalism is the way that many religiously believing people—and contemporary academic theologians especially—would like for the world to be. The world as we might wish it to be is one in which God’s grace extends to all persons without exception, and all persons freely and positively respond to it. Some contemporary universalists suggest that the harsh traditional doctrines of divine judgment and hell are keeping people out of the church. If the Christian church would only jettison these doctrines, and replace the traditional “good news” (of salvation available through Christ) with the “better news” (of universal salvation as a foreknown outcome), then multitudes of non-Christian people would choose to become Christian. The church’s manifest love toward non-Christians would evoke a loving response from all.

Yet a moment’s reflection, on the basis of Scripture, will show the problems with this reasoning. Perfect love did appear once in history—his name was Jesus Christ. And what happened to him? Perfect love was nailed to the tree. Jesus said that “if the world hates me, you know that it hated me before it hated you” (John 15:18). Jesus’s reference to “hatred”—which he here calls “hatred without a cause”—subverts the sentimentalized notion that initiatives of love (whether divine or human) will always effect a return of love in kind. It simply isn’t so—and Jesus’s life bears this out. Another text, also in John, says that “everyone who does evil hates the light” (John 3:20). Soren Kierkegaard, in Training in Christianity, argued that every situation that might evoke faith in Christ might also evoke offense or “stumbling” over Christ. Hardness of heart is all around us. The Pharaoh of the Exodus may be the biblical poster boy for this attitude—unless we wish to award that place to Satan.

While there may be no necessary correlation between universalist theology and leftist politics, there is a common tendency in both to engage in wishful thinking rather than hard-nosed observation of human folly and depravity. Just as dictators all around the world (e.g., Bashir al-Assad in Syria) are not ready to relinquish their power when other people tell them too, so too the sinner against the Lord may not be ready to give up control of his or her own life when told the message of God’s love.

My book does not attempt an analysis of the Western cultural situation, but I would say that we are living in a society characterized by make-believe. We act as though our government can borrow money without paying it back, we play video games and films to launch us into alternative universes, and we watch sexually explicit films that offer a temporarily gratifying yet deeply distorted picture of physical intimacy. There are a lot of “opiates” going around—and don’t just mean oxycontin or fentanyl. Given the social context today, it is not surprising that some Christian teachers have become purveyors of an “opiate” called universalism.

Some (though not all) contemporary universalists (like Robin Parry) try to ground their theology in whole-Bible, canonical exegesis. But you argue that universalism inevitably entails a “hermeneutics of diminishment.” What does this mean?

To repeat my argument from the book: In universalist interpretations of the Bible, one often finds the surface-level meanings of the biblical text disappear and are replaced by something else.

In the symbolic and allegorical reading of the Bible, the threatening “fire” as spoken of by Jesus becomes a cleansing and purifying “fire” that removes my own wickedness, or the “fire” of my own lacerating conscience. The “lake of fire” in the Book of Revelation—is sometimes said to be God himself, thus contradicting the text of the Bible, which identifies the “lake” with “the second death” (Rev. 20:14). (Or is God himself “the second death”?!)

In existentialist readings of the Bible, the “shut door”s in Jesus’ parable that allows no one to enter the feast has nothing to do with any future situation or circumstance. These words instead—in Karl Rahner’s terms—belong to the genre of “threat discourse,” challenging me to make rightful decisions here and now. By emptying the biblical language of its reference to future events, Rahner’s existential interpretation evacuates Jesus’s gospel teaching of its spiritual force and its terrible urgency.

The canon-within-the-canon approaches to the Bible are, if anything, even less satisfactory than allegorical or existentialist interpretations for those who receive the Bible as divinely revealed. A universalist theology that begins by rejecting the Old Testament ought to be regarded ipso facto as non-Christian. One outcome of the early church battle with gnosis was a commitment—against Marcion—to the inspiration and authority of the Old Testament. Likewise, those who accept only some of the Gospels, or only certain passages in Paul, or the New Testament minus the Book of Revelation, are hardly in a better position. John Crowder goes so far as to claim that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are “not the gospel,” which is found only in the letters of Paul, and really only in what we might call the “finished work of Christ” passages and not the “work out your salvation” passages. Crowder thus offers a shrunken version of the Bible—a bit like ordering a full meal and being served a plate with three green peas and some parsley on the side.

Among scholars favorable to universalism (including Balthasar and Moltmann), many hold that there are two strands—one universalistic and another particularistic—in the letters of Paul, and that Paul never sought to resolve the contradiction. This viewpoint rests on the presumption that the apostle was an enigmatic puzzler and concocter of paradoxes (for the benefit of later professors!), had never made his mind up on something as fundamental as final salvation, or that he was simply too obtuse to see his own logical inconsistencies. I don’t find any of those assumptions to be plausible.

To my mind, Robin Parry has gone furthest toward developing an argument for universalism, based on the entire Old and Testaments, in his book The Evangelical Universalist. Yet the exegetical problems in that book are manifest, as I have sought to show in my book. I can honestly say (and as a friend of Robin’s) that reading The Evangelical Universalist convinced me more fully than before that an exegetical case for universalism simply cannot be made on the basis of the whole of the Bible, interpreted in more or less grammatical-literal terms. To uphold universalism, one has to evade certain scriptural texts, either by means of non-obvious spiritualization (e.g, the “fire” not as punishing but as purifying) or simply through a fiat rejection of bothersome verses.

One of the most interesting themes through your massive work is the idea that the universalist has the mindset of a “metaphysical rebel.” In fact, you say that a better one-word explanation for universalism is “metaphysics,” not “love.” Can you explain the role of metaphysics in the motivation and appeal of universalism?

The notion of the “metaphysical rebel” is not original with me, but it is something that I encountered in the writings of the French atheist Albert Camus and especially his book The Rebel. People throughout history have rebelled against those in authority because of particular social conditions—calling for the abolition of slavery, for a safer work environment, for voting rights for women. Yet the metaphysical rebel resists or rejects not some particular state of affairs, but the universe as such. (There’s a story about the 19th-century author Margaret Fuller, who struggled with this issue and finally blurted out: “I accept the universe!” to which Thomas Carlyle responded, “Gad, she’d better!”) The metaphysical rebel questions the basic conditions of the universe: Why should I be mortal? Why must I experience pain? Why ought I eat food? Why must I work to earn a living? The recent rise of transhumanism might be seen as a metaphysical rebellion in which human beings seek to recreate themselves in the fashion they wish—overcoming death, abolishing pain, transcending limitations. Those involved in radical body modification (e.g., changing one’s gender, becoming physically non-gendered, assuming an animal or non-human form) are further instances of the same way of thinking, in which nothing about human life is fixed or given and everything is subject to alteration, according to individual volition.

In the sphere of theology, the metaphysical rebel might begin a statement with the words: “If I were Creator of the world. . . .” To which I would want to say: “Stop! Don’t finish that sentence!” None of us is the Creator, and I don’t believe that any of us human beings is in a position to lay out on our table the various possible worlds that God might have created, and then evaluate these alongside of the actual world, and draw conclusions as to how much wisdom God did or did not exhibit in the creation of the world we presently see. A good deal of universalist reasoning is highly speculative and rests on the assumption that we—or at least some of us—are sufficiently knowledgeable and intelligent enough to adjudicate these questions. John Kronen and Eric Reitan, in their book God’s Final Victory, argue that it would be wrong for God to provide salvation only to those who believe in Christ, since salvation for believers and unbelievers alike would maximize God’s salvific purposes (see The Devil’s Redemption, p. 1,037 n. 83). For this reason, they suggest that faith cannot be a prerequisite for salvation. This is the kind of counterfactual or blue-sky speculation that originates in human reasoning that has become wholly independent of divine revelation in scripture.

Debates over universalism thus raise questions about theological method. On my view, Christian thinkers are almost wholly dependent on Scripture for all that they might affirm regarding postmortem judgment and final salvation. But that is not the position that many Christian universalists would maintain.

Is it possible for someone to retain a basically sound evangelical framework, with universalism added on? Or does it necessarily require a reworking of one’s entire theological system?

Let me tell an historical story, which contains a moral.

Just before the Civil War, the Universalist Church in the USA is said to have been the sixth-largest denomination in America. But what happened to this now-forgotten church? Arguing that God does not punish anyone, the theologians of this church (e.g., Hosea Ballou) rejected the idea that Jesus on the cross underwent punishment for the sins of humanity. The atonement was the first domino to fall. This theological alteration set the Universalist Church on a path toward rejecting Christ’s divinity. For if Jesus was not our sin-bearer on the cross, then why would he need to be divine? Ironically enough, by the early 1900s many of the Universalist church members no longer believed in an afterlife. Some members were signatories of the secular Humanist Manifesto during the 1930s. Once heavenly salvation was declared for everyone, people stopped believing in it. In the 1960s the Universalists finally merged with the Unitarians to form the Unitarian-Universalists (or UU). Yet the vitality of the universalist movement in America had been waning since the time of the Civil War.

What then is the moral? The story suggests that that universalism is a church-killing doctrine. If the doctrine undermined the sixth-largest denomination in the USA, then what effect might it have on major churches today, should they tolerate or formally embrace this teaching?

In my book I use the analogy of playing a chess game. We might imagine a game in which one player makes a bold and splashy move by taking one of a fellow player’s important pieces—let us say a rook or even the queen. The crowd applauds. Yet the grand master in the background, who has been coaching the player who just made his move, covers his face with his hands. Why? Because the grand master sees several moves in advance, perceives the checkmate that lies ahead, and realizes that the inexperienced player has made a move that looked good in the short run but which will soon prove to be game-ending. So, too, the doctrine of salvation for all is a theological move that looks like a “winner” but which in the long run is anything but that.

To use another analogy: universalism is like a house for sale that has great “curb appeal.” If one were forced to buy a house based only on what one sees from the window of one’s car, then this would be the one. But what happens when one enters the house, goes into the basement, checks out the furnace, and examines the plumbing and electrical wiring? On inspection, it turns out that the house is hardly livable, since it doesn’t supply one with heat, light, or water. So it is with the universalist house—a great-looking specimen from the roadside view, but not a house that anyone can actually inhabit for long.

It’s possible that some reading this are universalists or tempted toward universalism. What would you say to them directly?

Human salvation is inherently a good thing, and thus salvation for all—if it turned out that way—would not be something that any Christian would or should object to. The New Testament calls on believers to share the good news and to evangelize among all nations, and to do so under the most difficult of circumstances (e.g., bearing witness to Christ in the Islamic world).

So it is not the case that conservative Christians have a stake in other people’s damnation, as is sometimes claimed.

The question is this: What is the proper basis or foundation of the Christian hope—whether hope for oneself or hope for other people?

The answer, I believe, is that hope ought to be based not on human reasoning but on God’s promise. When we raise the question of final salvation, we have to ask: What relevant promise is contained in Scripture? Is there a divine promise in the Bible to the effect that God will save everyone?

At this point, many universalists would admit that universal salvation is not something promised as such, but something that might be an inference lurking in certain biblical texts. Here the case of the fallen angels is instructive, because there is no hint anywhere in scripture that Satan or any of the fallen angels is ever saved. The serpent first appears in the temptation passage in Genesis, and reappears near the end of Revelation, when again provoking humanity to sin, and then is thrown into the lake of fire. In its written prayers, the historic church has interceded for many lost and abandoned sinners—murderers, rapists, kidnappers, and so on—yet one never finds in any era or liturgy any prayer for the salvation of Satan. This is a small bit of evidence, but a convincing one, to show the consensus of Christians through the centuries that some intelligent creatures made by God are finally lost.

The “eternal fire” to which Jesus refers in the Gospel of Matthew was not made in the first instance for rebellious humans but was “prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matt. 25:46). The first unnerving implication of this verse is that certain intelligent creatures made by God—i.e., the fallen angels—will certainly and finally be separated from God. The second unnerving implication is that some human beings—the “goats” in this passage—come finally to share the same fate as the fallen angels. It is hard to escape the force of this passage. Likewise, when Jesus was directly asked the question—“Lord, are there just a few who are being saved?”—it would seem then that Jesus had a great opportunity to preach a universalist message, but failed to do so. Instead, Jesus turned the inquirer’s attention back to himself, by saying first “strive to enter by the narrow gate” and then adding that “for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able” (Luke 13:23–24). Here is another passage that resists a universalist reading.

The best universalist response to the Luke 13 text, I suppose, is that the refusal of entrance must be temporary. Of course, one could go through the whole of the New Testament and add a qualification, wherever judgment or punishment is mentioned, to effect that this is only temporary. Beyond every dark cloud is a blue sky. One might end up with something like Andrew Jukes’s teaching on salvation-for-all-through-damnation-for-all—viz., the notion that somehow, on the other side of torment, there must be a good and pleasant outcome for everyone without exception. As a theological author, I shudder at the thought of giving anyone false hope and false comfort, which in the Book of Jeremiah is a distinguishing mark of the false prophet. To me it would be spiritually hazardous to tell those who have consciously rejected Christ that beyond the present life there will be further opportunities to respond to Christ—opportunities of which Scripture says nothing.

Beginning with God’s command to Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree in the garden, the whole of Scripture contains a message concerning “two ways”—a way leading to life or reward, and another way leading to death or punishment. Because this idea of the “two ways” is so deeply rooted in the Bible, I would say that a church congregation that is Bible-preaching and Bible-reading will simply not entertain the idea of universalism. That this doctrine is as widespread as it now is, is a measure of how small a place the Bible occupies in the sermons of many preachers, and in the reading and study habits of many churchgoers.

Why You Should Go to Church Even When You Don’t Feel Like It

David Sunday, pastor of New Covenant Bible Church in St. Charles, Illinois:

Friends, do you realize how vital it is to gather here together on the Lord’s Day, Sunday after Sunday? Satan loves to isolate us. This is a killer! Don’t neglect to gather together with God’s people in worship! You’re here today—but your presence here today is not just for today. It’s for five years from now. Twenty years from now. It’s for a time when you may find yourself alone in a cancer ward; or isolated from Christian fellowship in a desolate place; or in prison for your faith; or in terrible turmoil within your soul; or alone at home, in the middle of the night, after you’ve buried your loved one in the ground.

You cultivate the means of grace today for sustenance you may need way down the road.

There are seeds that are being planted today in your heart that may not blossom into full fruit until many days from now.

But your attendance in worship, your participation in baptism and the Lord’s Supper and confession and praise and thanksgiving and singing and intercession and hearing the preaching of God’s Word—it’s all being woven together by sovereign grace.

Through all these ordinary means of grace, God is weaving a tapestry of remembrance to sustain you in days to come, when your soul may be famished, when you may feel lost and alone—God will remind you then of something you heard, many years before; he will bring to your remembrance a song you had long since forgotten; a person who had taught you the Word of God; a face whose radiance in worship always inspired you; a faithful follower of Jesus who now has gone before you into his glorious presence—God will take sermons you’ve heard, and bear fruit from them in your life decades from now. You may not recall the exact content. But the good seed of God’s Word is being planted in the soil of your heart, and it will bear fruit in its season, just when you need it.

That’s why we meditate on the teachings of God in Scripture day and night. That’s why we gather in the house of God with the people of God week by week. We don’t do it just for the immediate benefit. We take the long view. We cultivate these rhythms of grace, we practice these disciplines of worship, so that when the years of drought come, we will remember: we will recall when our souls pour dry the days of praise within God’s house. And the very remembrance will sustain us.

The entire sermon, entitled “Preach the Gospel to Yourself When Your Soul Is Downcast,” is outstanding.

What Does It Mean to Be a Dual Citizen?

In the September 2018 issue of Tabletalk magazine, I contributed an article on what it means to live as dual citizens between the times.

Here is an excerpt on citizenship:

One of the biblical metaphors for thinking through our relationship between the present age and the age to come is citizenship.

Citizenship is a publicly recognized legal status that authorizes someone to be a citizen—that is, a full and functioning member of a civitas, a social and political community, along with the rights and duties that come along with it.

Unlike someone who is merely a subject in a kingdom, a citizen participates in the community to help maintain civic order.

In the book of Acts, we see the Apostle Paul not only acknowledging the concept of his Roman citizenship but also actively appealing to it.

When the police told Paul and Silas that the magistrates authorized their quiet release from jail, Paul became indignant: “They have beaten us publicly, uncondemned, men who are Roman citizens, and have thrown us into prison; and do they now throw us out secretly? No! Let them come themselves and take us out” (Acts 16:37).

In Acts 22, Paul successfully protested a flogging at the hands of the magistrates by asking the centurion a simple question: “Is it lawful for you to flog a man who is a Roman citizen and uncondemned? . . . I am a citizen by birth” (Acts 22:25, 28). In both cases, the response by the Roman authorities was one of genuine fear, since they had been unjustly violating the rights of one of their citizens (Act 21:38–39; 22:29).

Although Paul had obtained Roman citizenship through his family’s history, he came to have another kind of citizenship as well. Writing to the church in Philippi, he says that for Christians, “our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3:20).

Jesus said His kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36). When we are born again and are adopted into the family of God, we enter a new kingdom and submit to a new King, having been “delivered . . . from the domain of darkness and transferred . . . to the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Col. 1:13).

You can read the whole piece here.

The Tyranny of the Immediate in Short Attention Span Theatre

Over the weekend Alan Jacobs, distinguished professor of the humanities in the Honors Program of Baylor University, had an important post on how we process the never-ending influx of information fixated on Now:

The more time people spend on social media, the more prone they become to recency bias, and especially the form of recency bias that inclines us to believe that what has just happened is far more important that it really is.

Everyone everywhere is prone to recency bias, but I think we are more prone to it than any society in history because our media are so attentive to the events of Now, and we are so immersed in those media that anything that happened more than a week or so ago is consigned to the dustbin of history. The big social-media companies function as what I have called the Ministry of Amnesia, and the result is that we lack temporal bandwidth. Unless we work hard to cultivate that temporal bandwidth, we won’t have the “personal density” to resist the amnesia-producing forces that make us think that whatever happens today is more important than anything that has ever happened.

Increasingly, I think, the people who rule our society understand how all this works, and no one understands it better than Donald Trump. Trump knows perfectly well that his audience’s attachment to the immediate is so great that he can make virtually any scandal disappear from the public mind with three or four tweets. And the very journalists who most want to hold Trump accountable are also the most vulnerable to his changing of the subject. He’s got them on a string. They cannot resist the tweets du jour.

This tyranny of the immediate has two major effects on our political judgment. First, it disables us from making accurate assessments of threats and dangers. We may, for instance, think that we live in a time of uniquely poisonous social mistrust and open hostility, but that’s only because we have forgotten what the Sixties and early Seventies were like.

Second, it inclines us to forget that the greatest of social changes tend to happen, as Edward Gibbon put it, insensibly. Even when they seem sudden, it is almost always case that the suddenness is merely a very long gradual transformation finally bearing fruit. There’s a famous moment in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises when one character asks another how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” the man replies. “Gradually and then suddenly.” But the “suddenly” happened because he was previously insensible to the “gradually.” Likewise, events are always appearing to us with extreme suddenness — but only because we are so amnesiac that we have failed to discern the long slow gradual forces that made this moment inevitable.

And so we float on, boats with the current, borne forward ceaselessly into an ever-surprising future.

You can read the whole thing here, where he applies this principle to John McCain and Donald Trump.

See also Samuel James’s complementary new piece, Death by Minutia. Here is an excerpt:

Social media is not the first technology to weaponize trivia. Neil Postman eviscerated television’s effect on Americans’ ability to process information in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, and his critique has been both applied to social media and cited as an example of how every generation has their Luddites. But social media, especially Twitter, is different than television in important ways. It is more mobile, more personal, and its neural rewards are more alluring. Postman warned that TV makes us empty-headed and passive. But at its worst, Twitter can make us empty-headed and passive while we think we are actually being smart and courageous. Trivialities are dangerous to the degree that we cannot actually tell them for what they are. In our age, it’s not the silly vacuity of TV that gets pride of place in our cultural imagination, but the silly vacuity of hashtags and screenshots. Television is just television. Twitter is resistance.

Confusing minutia for meaning is a surefire path toward mental and emotional burnout at best, and an existential transformation into the very things we despise at worst. Fortunately, there are off-ramps. The best way to fight this burnout is to unplug and log off, redirecting your best energies away from the ephemera of online controversies and toward analog life. Because of the neurological boost social media offers, being conscious of its effects is the first, hardest, and most important step toward resisting them. These intentional acts are likely to arouse a sense of condemnation, either from ourselves or others, for not being as “in the know” as we once felt compelled to be. But this is precisely the social media illusion: that being “in the know” about petty, trivial, insignificant trends and conversations is no different than being in the know about anything else. All it takes is a few days away from the black hole of Twitter controversies to recalibrate the mind and realize just how small and unreal they are.