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The (Universalist) Lord's Prayer

Often discussions about universal salvation get bogged down in things like the meanings of particular words and the correct interpretation of certain Bible verses. Duelling lexicons, clash of the commentaries.  If universalism is just an alternative intellectual framework, what's the point? If we remain as exclusive and dogmatic in our practice as we ever were, then no-one's gained by the change. I've been thinking, then, about how a universalist faith affects our lives. How should it change the way we relayed God and one another? Perhaps, for instance, we might pray Lord's Prayer a little differently. Our Father in heaven Hallowed be your name. God is righteous and powerful but his righteousness and power are shown above all in love. We come before God in full confidence. Certainly we have shame and perhaps, because of that, some trepidation. But we need not fear, either for ourselves or for our loved ones. We know that whatever punishment we receive will only

Hell in a Nutshell

In the first 30 years of my involvement in church, I would have heard the term 'Universalism' a handful of times.  Most of these were passing, dismissive references from the pulpit or by an established teacher.  I never heard or read a proper explanation of what the term meant. If I had to depend on my church, nothing would have changed.  I have still never heard the concept explained in my church.  I still hear preachers refer to it dismissively from time to time and now that I know more I realise that they have very little understanding of the thing they are dismissing. The difference is that now we have the Internet.  Literate, educated Christians are no longer dependent on their local church and the books their local bookshop is prepared to stock.  The full, fascinating and challenging diversity of the world is now at our fingertips.  We can find networks and forums of people interested in all sorts of things.  Our views can be challenged and questioned from all angles.

The Inescapable Love of God

Over the past couple of weeks I've been reading Thomas Talbott's book, The Inescapable Love of God.    I'm not really obsessed with the question of universal salvation but it does form part of my Christian faith and the question has come up in my church over the past year as some others move in a more Calvinist direction.  So I thought I'd provide a quick review just to keep the pot boiling. The Inescapable Love of God was first published in 1999, but has been out of print for a number of years before Talbott and Cascade Books released a second edition last year.  Universalism aside the author appears to be a fairly orthodox and even conservative Protestant, perhaps in a similar mode to Robin Parry whose book The Evangelical Universalist   was published in 2006 (under the pseudonym Gregory MacDonald) and dedicated to Talbott alongside my cousin Alex. Yet while Talbott's influence on Parry is clear, his book is very different to Parry's.  Parry concentrates o

The Evangelical Universalist

Speaking of nice people who give me books , a little while ago Alex gave me a copy of The Evangelical Universalist by Gregory MacDonald.  Alex himself is a passionate universalist who gets a thankyou in the book's preface and is very active on the Evangelical Universalist forum , which is well worth a look.  For myself, becoming a universalist was a fairly painless part of my gradual detachment from orthodox Evangelicalism.  At some point I realised I no longer believed that a loving God would condemn people to eternal torture, and when I realised that this viewpoint was called "universalism" I adopted the label for myself. For others the transition is much harder.  I've written previously about Rachel Held Evans' spiritual crisis , precipitated by the idea that innocent non-Christian victims of the Taliban would go straight to hell.  For someone like Evans, passionately empathetic and completely immersed in Christian fundamentalism, such a realisation can be

More On Universalism

My friend Trevor recently posted a Facebook link to an article in the New York Times entitled "The Case for Hell"  by Robert Douthat.  So of course I've been thinking some more about Universalism and all that. Douthat is obviously a believer in hell.  He laments what he sees as a decline in this belief, which he attributes to a growth in pluralism ("are Christians obliged to believe that Gandhi is in hell for being a Hindu?") and an increasing outrage at suffering which comes as a result of our prosperity and relative safety.  However, he sees a problem with a faith that eliminates hell. ...to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score. In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic a

Universalism

Nothing gets Christian bloggers talking like Universalism, the idea that all people, irrespective of faith, will receive God's mercy in the end.  Recently the debate has fired up again on the back of some very clever pre-publicity by the publishers of a book by Rob Bell called Love Wins.   I haven't read the book - in fact the only people who have so far are those lucky enough to receive advance copies to review - but the debate around its teasers is already fierce. In the small and rather random group of blogs I read, Mr Hackman , Like a Child and the wonderful Richard Beck argue the universalist side, while Luke and Simone among many more hold up the more orthodox end of the debate.  I have to confess that I lean fairly strongly to the universalist side, but I'm not well-read about the subject and it doesn't dominate my thoughts much of the time, at least not consciously.  We'll get to that in a minute. The dialogue, such as it is, seems to me to be pretty