I recommended The Evangelical Universalist to an Anglican minister I met earlier this year & surprisingly he read it & has now posted his review of it - encouragingly it wasn’t all negative either! 
Here are most of the positive bits (I’ll let you read the review to see his concerns/criticisms - feel free to respond to them):
It’s a shame his conclusion is:
(sigh) Well, at least he read it . . . that seed is there now, and who knows what will grow from it, when Abba is ready. 
But in the end it takes us to places that are unwarranted and unhelpful.
what does ‘‘unwarranted and unhelpful’’ have to do with - if the conclusions are true or not
It’s only “unwarranted and unhelpful”, if you’re making certain assumptions… 
If the conclusions are unwarranted, then the data for the conclusions are incorrect and/or the logic is invalid somewhere; consequently, the conclusions could only be accidentally true (despite the mistakes).
Untrue conclusions are not usually helpful; and even accidentally true conclusions are less helpful than competently true conclusions.
Robin’s reviewer was saying that Robin isn’t getting the data and/or the logic right, therefore the conclusions are unwarranted and therefore also unhelpful. Whether the reviewer was right about that is a whole other question. But he isn’t wrong in spirit and in principle to draw such conclusions about such conclusions.
(After all, no Christian universalist thinks a conclusion of some kind of eternal conscious torment or permanent annihilation is actually warranted, much less helpful. 
)
But is that what he actually said; or did he simply say that the overall approach takes us to places that are unwarranted and unhelpful? What places are these?
(From your comment, I’m assuming you read the review, I haven’t yet). What I see here is that the reason he thinks (if he does think this) he isn’t getting the data or the logic right is because he has certain presuppositions about that data and logic. Here’s why I think that: According to Alex’s post above, the author of the review says the following:
That doesn’t sound to me like he has a problem with the data or the logic per se, but rather the conclusions.
I haven’t read the review yet (too much on my plate), but the selections quoted by Alex don’t preclude faulty data and/or logic.
There are plenty of non-universalists I could say such things about, and even more strongly so! I am an avowed student of Lewis after all, and gladly send people to him all the time. But I couldn’t say that his conclusions on final post-mortem hopelessness are altogether warranted and helpful. In fact now that I’m a Christian universalist I feel obligated to caution new readers about that. 
I should clarify perhaps that I don’t recall much if any fault data and/or logic in Robin’s TEU. 
But I could easily imagine saying the quotes from Alex’s friend while disagreeing with Robin’s conclusions on evidential and/or logical grounds.
It is of course possible that there are presuppositional constraints that Alex’s friend is operating under, and that he might not be competent and/or honest enough to be unable to tell that he’s failing Robin on ground of not having those presuppositions rather than on faulty data and/or logic. But usually presuppositional constraints would be a clash of data claims, so he would think Robin’s data set is faulty; thus the conclusion would be unwarranted thanks to faulty data. That would be fair enough: the question would go back to a data conflict at the level of working presuppositions.
Not having read the review yet I can’t say. But I do want to be fair to him.
His concerns were:
i agree that hell as purgatory is problematic, and in my view is totally unnecessary.
earth is purgatory enough
however this is a small problem and i am happy to concede that this view has validity and also is a good entry point for people wanting to deal with the hell texts from a slightly less radical paradigm than i am suggesting!
though for me, coming via annihilationism in my case actually didn’t cause me any trouble at all in this, so there’s hope for him. he just needs to get around some of his assumptions.
there are some other things he said that i instantly thought he was bringing too much baggage into the debate. you almost have to view it as a fresh set of data and ignore your preconceptions as best you can.
you have gotten some well said points and the desire to be fair has to be praised but I also agree with what mel. has said above perhaps he just has a natural bias against said conclusions ! 
Yep. I suspected his number 3 would be on the list, as well as his last point. But this is where a complete paradigm shift and leaving behind of some entrenched assumptions about what the gospel is and how it should be spread. Still, he makes some useful points, and I think some are interesting concerns even within the context of universalism.
Actually, Robin writes several times about why the omnibenevolent God invokes hell at all and doesn’t “simply save” everyone forthwith (or words to that effect). Since the critic read TEU some time ago, he probably just doesn’t remember them.
What Robin doesn’t emphasize as much in one place, although he talks about it generally here and there, is that God punishes impenitent sinners. Sometimes that happens in this life (maybe always does to at least some extent), but so long as people remain impenitent for their sins God is going to keep troubling them about it in various ways.
Robin is more vocal in the book, however, about the notion that everyone does receive enough grace in this life to be saved by God from their sins, even if they don’t formally know or follow Christ yet. People in various ways refuse and abuse this grace, however, and so long as they continue impenitently to do so then there will be consequences.
So there is no quantification of grace in Robin’s actual theory. But any non-universalist must introduce quantification of grace one way or another: these people receive it but those never do; or everyone receives it in this life but not everyone in the next; or everyone receives it in the next life, too, but without persistence because God stops giving it eventually for whatever reason. Maybe the critic is trying for a “well, you too!” rebuttal, since his own theory cannot possibly involve anything other than an even more severe quantification of grace. (But the form of his reply reads as though he doesn’t realize this and thinks his soteriology is superior in that regard.)
(I would have put all this rather more strongly, or at least more concentratedly, than Robin does, but the material is there in the book.)
Robin does talk about this briefly (in chapter 5); but provides only tentative offerings (either the rebel angels aren’t real creature or at least real persons, or else the old person is annihilated and the new or original person redeemed, represented by “Satan” and “Lucifer”), and not much exegetical commentary (other than briefly referencing some verses that seem to teach the salvation of rebel angels.
In footnote 56, Robin adds, “The traditionalist would, no doubt, object that I do not consider the possibility that Rev 20:10 ‘means what it says’ and it is Colossians 1 that needs to be re-interpreted. The traditionalist is perfectly in order to attempt this but I imagine that their proposals for Colossians 1 would sound as far-fetched to me as my interpretation of Rev 20:10 probably sounds to them. Nobody obviously has the edge here so I appeal to my legitimate hermeneutical bias in favor of universalism as justification for re-reading Rev 20:10 in the light of Colossians 1.”
My Kindle version of the 2nd edition doesn’t have page numbers, but Robin’s study notes suggest his brief discussion on the salvation of rebel angels per se occurs on pages 129-31.
(I agree that the topic needs more exegetical and theological discussion, and I’m sure Robin does, too. Personally I and some other Christian universalists would have felt comfortable providing more such; but Robin isn’t comfortable with that yet, and doesn’t try to provide what he himself isn’t prepared to solidly back.)
Actually, Robin does not argue that it will finish incomplete at the day of judgment, but specifically argues that the glorified eschatological Bride will continue it after the lake of fire judgment. (I can’t give page numbers per se, but it’s in the chapter on interpreting RevJohn.) Whatever merit his argument does or does not have, it isn’t stretching into conjecture. (He may also argue it elsewhere–I know I would–but that’s the place I recall and was able to find in his book.)
Even if he happened not to argue this, Robin’s framework of kerygmatic proclamation certainly does not require the mode of proclamation to finish incomplete; on the contrary, inasmuch as the Church is required to cooperate with God, then if Robin is correct about God’s goals and persistence the Bride would be expected to persist along with God in achieving those goals. Why cooperation with God in God’s goals would be regarded as merely “arbitrary” (in the popularly pejorative sense) is something I can only guess about, not being familiar with the critic’s writing in other regards. (But I suspect the critic wasn’t thinking in those terms. I am quite sure Robin was.)
Since the critic does not explain what he means by “the context of Jew/Gentile categories” in relation to “categorical understandings of ‘all people’ in Romans 5”, which are categories St. Paul himself does not appeal to in Romans 5 (unless perhaps to explode those categories, leveling all people equally culpable before God (e.g. vv.13-14) and equally accessible by the grace of God through Christ as superior to Adam), I don’t know how to answer, either from Robin’s book or my own studies. Ditto the undetailed assertion that the transition of the Abrahamic covenant from nation to individual is too simplistic.
But I do know that Robin pre-emptively addressed a complaint of this sort in Appendix 5 (one of the new additions to the 2nd edition, which the critic probably didn’t have available at the time):
(Robin goes on to talk briefly about 1 Peter 3, with more detail in a footnote, and the apparently contrasting evidence of Heb 9:27, although not the latter in any detail here. It is unclear to me what his “second” reply is or was going to be.)
I should have thought that a concern for an increase in love fulfilled as justice/righteousness (fair-togetherness between people, the justice the Trinity positively enacts toward one another as the living standard and source of final Justice) is what stimulates our mission so that the Son of Man may find active lively faith on earth when He returns, and to as much of an extent as possible before He returns. But also to an increasing extent after He returns! To stop short of that totality seems to me antagonistic to the whole gospel imperative, to repent and be saved from our sins for the kingdom of God is near at hand.
Why a yearning and activity and longing and direction and purpose of seeing all creation filled with the righteousness of God should only inherently and rightly belong to this age, I do not know. I would think even an annihilationist (like our critic) would consider it a proper purpose and longing and activity of the age to come, unless he thinks rebellion and injustice is a proper activity of that age instead! Certainly annihilation puts a stop to the gospel imperative in regard to those souls, and I can’t see how it would put a stop to that imperative in a way protagonistic to that imperative.
At any rate, when a Jew cried out Maran Atha, it wasn’t out of worry that someone might be caught as an evildoer, but was rather a positive plea that God might catch evildoers and put an end to their oppression of the (more or less) innocent. Thus St. Paul, “Let any who do not love the Lord be anathema” before his declaration of “Maranatha” at the end of 1 Corinthians. Christian universalists (whether purgatorial like Robin and myself, or ultra-universalistic as some others are) have at least as much desire that God should come and start putting things right more directly than He currently does, as an annihilationist would or as a proponent of some variety of eternal conscious torment!
With this difference: we do not believe God will stop short (much less never start at all) bringing souls to be righteous, leaving them in ECT or annihilating them from existence. Consequently we notice that when the Hebraist recommended exhorting one another not to trod underfoot the Son of God and count the blood by which we ourselves were sanctified as being unclean, and not to insult the Spirit of grace, as we see the Day approaching; that the Hebraist follows this with a warning of fearful judgment, via references to Deuteronomy 32, that God shall vindicate His rebel people and lead them to repentance and reconciliation after punishing them until they are neither slave nor free.
Even so, come Lord Jesus! {Shawlam} every man according to his work!–fairly pay the ones so acted toward, complete them, save them, be friendly to them, make peace with them, make amends with them, perfect them, make them good, make prosper, make a peace treaty with them! All the connotations of {shawlam}!!
For as was revealed to David’s astonishment,
"One thing God has spoken;
"These two things I heard:
"That power belongs to God
"and lovingkindness is Yours, O Lord!
“For You {shawlam} a man according to his work!”
(Psalm 62:11-12)
By doing so we certainly do not insult the spirit of saving grace, nor regard the blood by which we ourselves are sanctified as being unable to save.
And we exhort our fellow Christians not to do so either.
Robin is more vocal in the book, however, about the notion that everyone does receive enough grace in this life to be saved by God from their sins, even if they don’t formally know or follow Christ yet. People in various ways refuse and abuse this grace, however, and so long as they continue impenitently to do so then there will be consequences.
‘‘GOD does not treat us according to our sins’’ 
I for one thank him immensely for that !, not that I am using it to disagree with the above either
I am new so I am almost afraid to comment here with so many experienced Bible scholars—which I am not yet. Tho it seems to me, a lot of the objections to CEU boil down to “If its true there is no reason to evangelize.”
This is NOT correct. I think there is MORE reason to talk to people about Jesus. A life with Jesus in it is so much better than one without–and we get Abba and the Holy Spirit too.
I think Universalism opens up more peoples’ hearts, they don’t have to live in terror of their loved ones undergoing ECT. We don’t have to make the Father scarey or define arbitrary cut offs in time.
I also post on a Mental Health Board. Many of the people who post there have been very injured by ‘Christians’ with spare the rod and spoil the child philosophies, exorcisms, people raping them while quoting Bible verses and other horrors. How can these people know Jesus until they see him? And those who believe in ECT would say they go to hell regardless??? As a CEU, if I met one of these people in real life and had an openning, I feel I could very carefully talk about Jesus to them. But with ECT—no way in, well no way in hell.
I think “The Evangelical Universalist” has it right and due to the above paragraph I don’t feel especially compelled to be fair to the critics. I think ECT does great harm and puts God in the position of a torturer no matter how fancy the theological robes are.
Hi Lizabeth; I just posted a copy of Josh Walters’ excellent article on why universalism actually requires evangelism over at the “E.S.A. Universalist article” thread here (the article is no longer available online). Take a look, I think you’ll appreciate it.
Thanks Mel. I loved it and it has lots of things to think about too.