Here is a fairly accurate transcript of all four McClymond discussions that follow his lecture on universalism. Well the task is actually done now. Phew…
Dialogues on Universalism with Michael McClymond. Geoffrey Fulkerson and Gerald Hieston.
[size=150]Universalism; the New Testament Doctrine of Mercy.[/size]
G.F. How is the doctrine of hell found in both Testaments and what is the canonical trajectory of linking God’s mercy in the NT with God’s judgement in the OT?
MM. I believe that in both Testaments mercy has priority over judgement. One of the remarkable things in the OT is the astounding mercy of God.
The astounding mercy of God is shown to the Ammonites and Moabites people who are at one point enemies of God’s people and most notably to the Assyrians – a passage in book of Isaiah speaks of Assyria the rod of my anger whom he has raised up to punish the Northern kingdoms and now is about to punish and we think ’end of story’. But later in the book we have the vision of the nations – including the Assyrians - sitting with Israel in the kingdom as restored children of God.
We also have the example of the wicked King Mannaseh who is one of the most wicked of the rulers of Israel who practised witchcraft and even child sacrifice. And yet when he goes into judgement he is greatly humbled before his enemies and he calls on God for mercy and he is not only restored to Jerusalem but actually restored to the throne. And the passage in Chronicles says ‘And then Mannaseh knew that the Lord is God’ – and this illustrates the passage in Romans that says that it is the kindness of God that leads us to repent.
That is one theme of mercy – but then there are some judgments of God that are simply irrevocable. The most prominent one is the irrevocable judgement on Babylon that appear in Jeremiah and Isaiah. The common denominator in these irrevocable judgment is that they are judgements against arrogance and prideful rebellion. The daughter of Babylon says ‘I sit as Queen and will be Queen forever. I will never know mourning and will never know judgement.
There is something about pride and arrogant rebellion that brings down God’s irrevocable judgement. And of course the judgment upon Babylon is picked up again in the Book of Revelation so the final end time judgement is coming upon Babylon. Jeremiah says very clearly that the city will be a ruin and will never be rebuilt. We have to look if we are to do judgement to the totality of scripture that God’s judgment is not final in very many cases but there are some of God’s judgements that are irrevocable.
GH The OT contains types and shadows and prefiguring of what is to come. It is appropriate to see God’s judgments of the flood, on Sodom and Gomorrah and against the Canaanites as prefiguring Gods eschatological judgements (because this is how Jesus saw them). In those OT judgments we see judgment against entrenched intractable rebellion. For example in the Book of Revelation when the people know God’s judgment is coming their Reponses is not to plead for mercy but to gnash their teeth in anger – which shows the depth of their perversity in cursing God.
GF The Day of the Lord is a theme that runs throughout scripture – where God’s judgment can be both cleansing and eternally damming (but sometimes people just expect the cleansing and don’t reckon that judgment may be damming for them)
GH People think of judgement as the dark side of God. But in reality you judge something as wanting because it threatens something that you value. So judgement is actually an expression of God’s love – not of his love for those he is judging but of his love for those he values. In Revelation the saints long for the judgment to come as his expression of his commitment to them. We spend so much time apologising for hell but in the heart of a believer there should be a longing for God’s judgment. IN Revelation Christ comes in wrath as judge not because people have been naughty and need a spanking but because they have abused his Bride the Church.
MM I see both restorative judgement and irrevocable judgment as evident in the Old Testament. Psalm 2 is interesting where God laughs to scorn the nations (which ends with the warning ‘kiss the son unless you perish’).
The Church culture has absorbed ideas from the Enlightenment and secular thought. We need to be more loving, caring and nicer. In Jesus we see perfect love but when this becomes manifest we murder him… And he tells us ‘If they hated me they will hate you also’. We have been seduced by the idea that everyone is essentially good
GH. This shows a misunderstanding of the destructive aspect of sin about how it warps the human heart… We see this in the fall in Genesis we see this when the Guards report Jesus resurrection to the Pharisees – they don’t deny it they just want it hushed up. As C.S. Lewis says – God leaves us with our hellish self autonomy if that’s what we chose in rebellion.
Ministerial reflections on UR
[size=150]Ministerial reflections on the doctrine of Hell[/size]
GF How does the doctrine of universalism distort all aspects of Church life?
GH If you start rejecting the wrath of God you ultimately start rejecting the love of God. I’m thinking of Psalm 136 with the refrain ‘ The love of God endures forever’ – but if you go through it God’s love means that he crushes my enemies – God’s judgement upon our enemies is his expression of your love for us. The problem with the trajectory of denying the wrath of God is that you end up denying the love of God and in the end denying God altogether even if you start off with the good intention of trying to protect the love of God.
I think we see this if you love a child. If you come back to the house and someone is harming the chid your response is going to be intense indignation and wrath. You cannot separate love from hatred and this is one of the insights of Jonathan Edwards in his treatise on the Religious Affections – that a person who truly loves god and loves another person will also love (he means ‘hate’ here 
) what is in opposition to God and opposition to human welfare. It’s naïve to think that life is just a big love fest.
If you lose Hell you lose atonement. If you lose atonement you’ve lost sin and you lose so much in the biblical data of gratitude to God for the redemption and this begins to recede from the corporate experience of worship.
In the Patriot Mel Gibson’s son is killed by a British officer. Another is about to be executed but the British so Mel Gibson wipes out a whole British regiment to rescue him while his two youngest sons who are only boys look on in horror but also in wonder and amazed gratitude. IN that movie Gibson’s love is so fierce that it invokes a sense of fear in his other children. We get something of the same sense in Revelation when we see Jesus coming back with blood all over his clothing after treading out the winepress of God’s wrath - you know how much he loves you and it’s almost frightening. In a universalist church you lose that sense of awe –of ‘Wow do I wanna be loved that much?. IT’s scary how much he loves us - and you’d be in danger of losing that sense of fear.
MM. In a church that is characterised by the love of God with wrath taken out you don’t have the idea of salvation as rescue. If there is salvation its enhancement ‘My life is really pretty good but it could be raised up to a higher level’. This is where we have a Church that focuses on seminars; How to have a better marriage’, how to raise happy children etc… And there is no message that there is something radically wrong with us that can only be rectified by or saviour. Kierkegaard talks in Philosophical fragments about religion A and religion B
Religion A says we already have the truth within us and we need a teacher to draw it out
Religion B says we are destitute; we don’t need a teacher, we need a saviour.
There is a radical difference in what salvation means depending on your assessment of the human situation.
GF Bonheoffer in his idea of Cheap Grace was critical of the idea that we are saved by subscribing to a certain confessional statement.
MM The phrase goes back to Bonheoffer in his marvellous book ‘The Cost of Discipleship’. He says that ‘cheap grace is the grace that we give ourselves’ that minimises the depth of our sin (‘my sin is not so bad…)
Cheap grace is Christianity without the cross, And we see this in some Churches with the cross being taken down and an emphasis on Christ’s victory and the deleting of references to the cross in preaching. The message of the cross is that we are really not OK, complete etc.
G H: In a Church that marginalises the doctrine of Hell preaching will be handled differently. You are either have start to do Marcionite stuff and leave out the Old Testament stuff as not relevant or not accurate – or be ambiguous as we see in Brian McClaren
MM McClaren preaches charity at the expense of clarity and this is something we are seeing in Universalist influenced Churches – ambiguousness and even a celebration of ambiguity. The idea is that the further you go in the Christian life the more uncertain you become – this is not a scriptural idea.
Also we see tortured exegesis. Robin Parry says that the lake of fire in Revelation is OG d himself - and this leads him in to all sorts of exegetical somersaults.
The larger narrative of Revelation is the irrevocable judgement of God – take away this narrative is that there is no urgency to preach the Gospel. Universalism evacuate our decision making –we can directly trace the decline of evangelistic effort to Karl Barth and co.
[size=150]Pastoral reflections on Hell[/size]
GF We’ve agreed that hell is the orthodox position in theology how do we counsel people grieving for those who have died outside to the faith?
G.H. Even in Churches where there is not a rejection of hell there is a silence on it. That’s a hard thing. IT’s easy to talk about Hell in an abstract philosophical discussion. I did a funeral of a person who died an atheist recently who was the brother of a friend of mine . How do you navigate that and what do i say to my friend who knows his brother fro whom he had affection died an atheist and has now slipped under the judgement of God. This is the ultimate question of theodicy.
The Book of Job offers us resources here. Job found himself in a situation where he didn’t have a lot of information about and was not completely aware of what was going on
Job is a righteous man by God’s standards and God who says – ‘I bless righteousness and I bring judgement upon wickedness’ – and he had every reason to expect that he would continue to be blessed. What he did not reckon in his theological calculus – and neither did his friends – was wickedness.
He doesn’t have a theological category for wickedness and the answer that comes in the end is a theophany of God – not explanation. When the issue of hell gets personal when it’s someone I know silence is the best response and finding peace in God himself (that God himself has it figured out) – instead of our theological explanations and rationalisations.
If hell doesn’t; make sees to us it is not for us to judge God for the decisions he made – I’ve met him and seen him in Christ and that is enough. Perhaps there is other stuff for God to reveal that will make sense of Hell.
MM. IN Psalm 19 there is an affirmation that the judgments of God are true and righteous. This is echoed in Revelation 19 where the saints in heaven having seen God’s judgement on Babylon rejoice in this - with the benefit of the information that informs a heavenly view. Our problem is that we are on the ground. Jonathan Edwards had a fascinating analogy for this. He spoke of how from the ground if we point to view the tributaries of a river may seem to be going nowhere. However, from above we can see that they all ultimately join the river that flows into the sea - and this it is like God’s providence.
GH: Hell is the one doctrine today that challenges us to trust God judgment over our own, Maybe that wasn’t true tow hundred years ago. Keller in his book ‘The reason for God’ makes the point that in past times and other cultures people would be offended if you did not believe in hell rather than if you did believe in it.
Hell is the most important doctrine regarding our discipleship because it forces us to come to grips with the fact that we are not God
[size=150]**Hell in Cultural perspective **[/size]
GF Wants to tease out ecclesial implications of MM’s stimulating lecture. While it is certainly right to question UR from the hell passages in Bible – there is more at stake here in terms of cultural laxity and the cultural milieu. What are the values and assumptions of our times that are making this doctrine seems so enticing to us.
MM – Universalism has been marginal for all of Church history but we see a spike in its growth across all denominations – even evangelicals and Pentecostals - now in the twenty first century. The doctrine of hell is interconnected wit central Christian themes What is the nature of God,? What is the nature of Christ? What is the nature of human beings? Why did Jesus die on the cross.?
There is a reaction against the notion of God as authoritative
There is a notion of human nature as essentially good and not in need of punishment
Therefore it no longer makes any sense to think of anyone being punished eternally or separated from God.
G.H. The rejection of modernity and the embracing of post modernity is important here. -The postmodern ethos is all about a rejection of authority, a rejection of metaphysics that we all have to subscribe to, a rejection of a notion of a transcendent God,
Hell is the ultimate statement that there is a God who we have to give an account to, who judges and says ‘the buck stops here’ in the universe. That’s not trendy and it doesn’t appeal. Universalism is an attractive option to someone who want to have a faith perspective but does not want to have Hell as part of this perspective. The philosophical movements in the West have contributed to this. It is interesting if you look at other parts of the world – like the Islamic world – the doctrine of hell is not quite as troubling as it is in the West.
GF In the lecture you connected universalism to Gnosticism. Do you see any link between Gnosticism and post modernity?
MM: The Gnostic worldview does not sharply separate humanity from God so it does tie in with the postmodern trend. For Gnostics the creature is just an alienated aspect of God’s won nature and ultimately everything that is separated must come together again, God cannot be separated from God and even Lucifer is like the prodigal son that is destined for salvation. It is a worldviews in which there cannot be any separation and there is no place for a doctrine of Hell. We may bring negative consequences on ourselves thorough our evil actions - somewhat like the doctrine of Karma - but there is no external imposition because we are not under God.
GH And with that you have an ontological union between God and creature and there’s not a lot of room for sin
GF The average person sitting in the pew who accepts the cultural mores and believes in self actualisation probably would not say they believe in God returning to God. Tease out the implications of how our suspicion of authority and belief in self actualisation has this underpinning Gnostic metaphysic.
MM It’s not obvious, but the message of post modern culture is ‘I am my own person; the captain of my own ship’. This is a deeply American message that interfaces with the Gnostic narrative. In the nineteenth century you have Ralph Waldo Emerson the transcendentalist with his famous essay on Self Reliance. Emerson proposed something like karma - what he called a doctrine of compensation – that evil has its own consequences. But Emerson had no scriptural notion of God – rather he spoke of the ‘Oversoul’ of which we are all part. We have to come back to the foundational principles of the purity and holiness of God. We have to come back to the Old Testament. If we start with the New Testament we are much more likely to shape the image of Jesus like a piece of play-dough to how we want tit.
If we start with the Old Testament we see that when sin was committed God prescribed that people had to perform sacrifices. So a poor innocent hapless lamb – the lamb that was bleating and then bleeding - had its throat slit . Why would the God of the Bible require this? The Universalists don’t; have a good answer. IF we start with the cross at the centre of our faith we see these sacrifices as pointing forward to the final sacrifice. The message of sacrifice is that sin is a very serious thing that brings consequences in its train. It doesn’t just hurt the one who is sinned against. Every act of sin is directly an offence against God.
G.H. Regarding the Gnostics, one of the first heresies tied into a lack of understanding about the Trinity. With Gnosticism you have a lack of understanding of sin and its consequences. With post modernity – like Gnosticism we have a rejection of sin. Once you start loosing the doctrine of sin, whether through Gnosticism or postmodernity, you are going to lose any understanding of the doctrine of Hell.
M.M. An insight from C.S. Lewis. Lewis pointed out that when Jesus came into a situation where he declared forgiveness of sin – he could make that stamen because he was speaking on God’s behalf and as God Incarnate. The implication is that when human begins sin against each other God is the chiefly offended party
G.H. Psalm 51 –‘against you and only you have I sinned’. It’s remarkable because at this point David has just killed a man and stolen his wife and probably killed a whole bunch of people.
M.M. We have to keep relaying these foundational doctrines to make any sense of the doctrine of Hell. Everything come together in the cross where we see God’s holy hatred of sin and his profound love for the sinner.
We haven’t talked much about human choice; but if you are a universalist you will have to say that everyone makes the same choice – a hard conclusion to come to when you look around and see people making different choices - or that you say choices don’t matter (like Richard Dawkins is going to be our brother in heaven along with those who believed in Christ)
If you look at Jesus and when people encountered him he was a fork in the road. As Kierkegaard said – ‘Any situation that can lead to faith can also lead to stumbling’. Jesus is either the stone of stumbling or the cornerstone. The theme runs all through the Gospels and I don’t this we can escape that.
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Yes, I agree with James that this must’ve been painful indeed. Go and make yourself a nice cuppa tea and take a breather-- You done good!