And that’s what it comes down to, like he said to the Pharisees: “You search the scriptures to find eternal life, but here I stand in front of you and you can’t recognize Me!”
Sonia
This is a good reminder and misdirected zeal is a pitfall for me these days. I get caught up in how badly people have characterized God needing a violent atonement, not punishing for our sake, giving up on others that I have to really watch myself. I think it’s ok to share what I think, but very humbly. Sometimes it does seem like, though, that the faith that we are bringing people to is not that God really forgives, has grace toward all, is reconciling all things, what God wants is for us to obey from the heart, but rather a faith of do you believe in penal substitution. Sometimes I get to thinking, are we really on the same team? I know they are thinking that about me for sure.
I disagree. Sadly there are many, many, many, many conservative evangelical Christians who say they believe in hell but their actions say different. I heard an atheist say, that Christians really don’t believe in hell because if they truly did, they would shout it from the rooftops day in and day out but they don’t. Pride is a powerful thing 
Hey Oxy, I don’t understand your post here. You disagree with what? Have your read The Evangelical Universalist? Even though I’m not sure what you are responding to here, I agree with you that many Christians act as if hell doesn’t even exist.
Chris
Well in the end all conservative evangelicals will be thoroughly convinced of UR.
I read the whole Bible but skipped to the back and found out that we win… Well, it’s the Almighty who wins over all mankind.
Me! I’ve done a complete 180 degree turn.
I used to post in the Lewis site Into the Wardrobe. Sometime last century, in the middle of a thread about who-knows-what, something went click in my brain (Literally. It felt like click 
), and I was suddenly a universalist. I’d not been thinking about it, or reading about it, or leaning that way. It all happened between one breath and the next. Most peculiar.
But surely by now that’d be fairly commonplace for you, wouldn’t it? 
Mine came slowly, but progressively. I grew up in a conservative Baptist home. All I knew in my formative teen years was basically the Four Spiritual Laws brand of salvation. Hell was a reality and I certainly didn’t want to end up there. So nautrally I made sure I was saved. But I think that because when we are young our world view is limited to our immediate surroundings, we don’t get too caught up in what’s happening around the rest of the world. For me, my Chrisian growth was stunted by other worldly interests in my late teens and early twenties that I drifted.
It wasn’t until I came to myself, like the Prodigal, at about age 22 that I really experience the glorious love of God after a low point in my life, and a sense forgiveness I never experienced that I felt like I was born again, again. There was a definite spiritual change in my life that transformed my whole outlook. I knew now how much God really loved me. It was then that I began to have concern for souls, not so much about escaping hell, though that was still a major selling point, but because I wanted others to experience God’s love and forgiveness. Because I didn’t return to God out of fear of hell, but because of a real need in my sorted life.
Fast forward to circa 2005. I spent 20 years in the Navy and seen a good portion of how other people live in the world. I’m married to one foreigner and have two children, and attending a Independent, Fundamental Baptist Church. Still hooked on the idea of ECT, for some reason I started thinking about the lost of the world. I think it was because we just hit the 6 billion mark in world population, but something just didn’t make sense to me. Being a fundamental meant believing that out of the 6 billion people in the world, only 2 billion people claim to Christianity. And out of that group, approximately 1.5 billion are Roman Catholics. And while I didn’t believe every Catholic was on their way to hell, their method of works salvation led me to believe that a majority were, being the conservative Baptist that I am.
So that left 500 million left over consisting of various other Christian groups, including cults. Factoring away Mormons, JWs, Christian Science, and other aberrant groups, plus the reality that even if people are part of the church that doesn’t necessarily means they are saved, some are nominally “Christian”, I estimated that the number of “true” believers consisted conservatively of about 250 million believers. That’s only 4% of the population that are saved (I’ve heard others estimate only 1%). And that doesn’t even account for the estimated 100 billion souls that ever lived on the planet. Can you imagine 99 billion souls withering in Hell?
Where is the glory in that? How is God magnified in such dismal numbers? I just don’t see victory in such a sorry track record.
If God is concerned with souls, if the souls of men mean so much to Him, if man is His greatest creation, then He is a failure. Who is God trying to impress? How is He going to get any kind of Glory if the vast majority of His creation is burning and wasting away in Hell? This doesn’t seem the kind of God I am interested in worshipping, does it you? And how does this glorify Christ, who is supposed to be Savior of the World?!!
Don’t get me wrong. I was thankful that I did get saved. But I was also in survivor’s guilt. Why was I so fortunate to be born in a Christian home with Christian parents in a free country while many in other parts of the world happened to be born in the wrong religion and are at the very risk of Hell because of it, though it wasn’t their fault they were born in that situation.
Something is amiss here. Something is very wrong with the statistics. Something has to be wrong, or there is no glory to God.
Puzzled by the prospects, I do remember C.S. Lewis speaking about what he called “anonymous Christians” In other words, these are people who may have never heard the Gospel, yet their character is one that shows the love of God and love for people reminiscent of Christian behavior. Is it possible that God judges the heart of a person based on their example to lead a Christ-like life apart from the knowledge of Christ? Are there people ‘saved’ in their hearts yet don’t know it? Is it possible that the Blood of Christ flows for such that have never heard of them?
The prospect seemed hopeful, but was there any biblical backing for it? One passage that caught my eye (and I have quoted it repeatedly on this forum) is Acts 17:24-28, where Paul on Mars Hill speaks about the UNKNOWN GOD, that the Athenians worshipped. What struck me is verse 26-27, *“And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us:” *
Now here was a verse that tells me that God placed people where they are and at the times HE has appointed, not that they should miss the Lord because of their circumstances, but that they should FIND the Lord, who is not far from every one of us. According to this verse, God is accessable to ALL people.
This realization becamed confirmed in an autobiography of an Afghan Muslim girl named Farah Ahmedi called, "The Story of My Life: An Afghan Girl on the Other Side of the Sky ", an amazing story of a 12-year old amputee, from an Afghan mine, whose courageous story of overcoming obstacles was inspiring enough to be featured on ABC’s Good Morning America. What got me is that there was a certain moment when she doubted God (in her faith, Allah), but decided to trust Him with all her heart and found the same kind of love and forgiveness that paralleled my own experience. Somehow, God showed His love to this Muslim girl in the same intensity as He showed me. This story, and other stories I read like it, convinced me that Acts 17 must indeed be true. Somehow God is able to reach beyond the boundaries of religion and touch the hearts of people He loves. It gave me a greater hope that maybe in the end, more people than I could imagine are ‘saved’.
I could continue, but my post is too long already. But this is what eventually led my to the possiblity of UR, though I still have some reservations. But I am hopeful that the Love of God prevails.
Cool testimony! Thanks for sharing it. 10 or so years ago, I too asked for a revelation of Hell, thinking that it would empower me in evangelism by motivating me more. I had no idea that the “revelation” would be that Hell is NOT scriptural, not just, not logical, nor in line with the character of God!
Sherman, either God is at work or even the very elect are being deceived. I guess either way God is at work. Thanks for the encouragment.
I went on a mission trip to NYC last month and later sat by a fire with the pastor of the church that I went with. He told me that seeing the multitude of people up there made him wonder if God wasn’t saving people another way apart from the church. I didn’t say much, letting God do His thang. 
Wow the testimonies here are great to read!
I can relate in some way to each of them and it makes me feel very happy!
I became convinced of UR about 4 years ago out of a very conservative Southern Baptist background. Jesus said, “The truth shall set you free”, and my conversion to UR was exactly this – I felt free and started sharing the Good News with nearly everyone I could get into a conversation about it.
Many of the people I share the Good News of UR with get very angry and from my own experience I can somewhat understand why.
A good buddy of mine is friends with the Talbott family and as I was discussing with him one day my conclusion that Annihilation made more sense to me than either Calvinism or Arminianism, he told me about the “other option”. I initially completely dismissed this “other option” because in my mind it was heresy. The heresy factor caused me to be afraid to even discuss it but then as we talked the fear turned to anger at the thought of everyone eventually being reconciled. Fear and anger - quite the telling reaction.
However, this “other option” possibility began to turn over in my mind. The Bible says salvation is the free gift of God’s grace and not by works of men. My initial anger revealed to me that this was not what I actually believed.
Instead I believed my salvation was the result of my:
• Being smart enough to have the right beliefs
• Being humble enough to say the right prayer
• Being good enough to persevere daily in all the Christian disciplines – you know – study, prayer, church attendance….
In short, I actually believed my salvation was because of me. I was doing all the right things and therefore deserved my free ticket to heaven. This of course was in contrast to all those “lost” people that weren’t doing quite so well as me.
A few weeks later someone gave me the “If Grace is True” book and for some reason I went right to the last chapter to see how the book ended. I read the book chapter by chapter backwards - not sure why – never done it before and haven’t done it since.
Anyway in the middle of the book suddenly the whole UR thing dawned on me and I guess for the first time I truly worshipped God who alone is my salvation.
I was free!
My view of “the lost” changed that day too. I saw every person as God’s dear child that He loved unconditionally and would love until they too were joyously reunited. My story would be no different than their story – all equally loved. No more “us and them” - now it was “us and us”.
In the last 4 years I’ve seen this same transformation happen in a few people but mostly it’s been a hard row to hoe.
I pray that God will greatly bless the courageous work of most on this forum and others like Rob Bell who are spreading the truly Good News.
I experienced this too, and have heard many others say the same. I never felt like I loved people enough before. That was a huge change for me.
Sonia
davidbo
This is so spot on to what happened with me. Precisely. I really appreciated your whole story. Mine is fairly similar. The thing with me now is that I feel like God is actually good. Before I knew that as a piece of head knowledge. Now I’m utterly convinced in my spirit. The eyes of my heart have been opened to it. The strange thing also is that if I talk to people about it, I’m not overly concerned whether they believe it or not (apart from my wife!). God seems to have removed that burden of “if everyone doesn’t believe what you say, you’ve failed” from me. It is a great sense of freedom.
This I’ve seen also. For me it wasn’t anger, more like a feeling that the person who was telling me had really and honestly fallen into heresy.
dondi,
This is so true also. I believe most Christians who believe in ECT (including previously myself) have never stopped to ponder statistics like this, and come to conclusions. If these stats are true, then God is absolutely an utter failure, and not worthy of our worship. I also think that most Christians have never stopped to reflect on “eternal” conscious torment, and what that entails. For instance, imagine 1 trillion years, that is 1 million billion years. Now imagine being tormented (tortured?) physically and spiritually for the whole of that time, with no letup and no possible hope of escaping it. Now…that time is but a split millisecond in the scheme of eternity. If that’s what God does, then God is a monster.
Fortunately, God’s not like that!
Many have pointed out that if Christians truly believed in that vision of hell they would shout it from the rooftops. But they don’t shout it because they don’t believe it. They don’t believe it because it’s literally impossible to love and desire such a God, yet in their hearts they do love and desire God.
UR is a matter of joining the dots. We all experience hell when we hate God, and we potentially can hate God forever. Those who hate God are in bondage to sin. Christ came to set us free from bondage to sin, but each in his own time.
The world is a vast prison. Christ has opened the door to our cell and given us a bunch of keys and a burning torch. Our task is to go up and down the dismal corridors, opening doors and rousing the sleepers. (Christ will have to carry some into the light, so deep is their darkness.) That fact that we’ve been set free before many others doesn’t mean all won’t one day be set free.
Love that picture, Allan!
Sonia
To be fair, that’s only a problem for Arm theology. One of the “selling points” for Calv theology (pro or con) is that it avoids this problem–because God never even intended to save those people.
If He didn’t intend to save them, then He doesn’t fail to save them. He’s totally 100% successful in His intentions to save sinners.
This introduces issues that Arms and Kaths think of as being a very different and equally serious problem, or course. But it’s important to keep in mind why this is so important in order to understand why Calvs are willing to go so far in coming up with ways to try to explain or affirm God’s intentions not to save the lost. They’re trying hard to avoid the obvious failure problem of Arm theology. We can hardly disagree that they’re right to be trying to avoid that! (Just like we don’t disagree that the Arms are right to be trying to avoid denying that God is essentially love, not least for practical evangelism purposes.)
Awesome analogy AllanS!
I see what you are saying but who does it fool? The Calv ends up air tight in their case (in a twisted sort of way) but they look foolish since God ends up looking like a monster. The non-Christian world sees it and asks, “Where is the glory? Where is the power?” Why do these Calvs keep saying, “Look how great my God is! He successfully saved a tiny fraction of humanity from sin while damning the vast majority!”