Melchizedek » Fri Mar 07, 2014 12:45 am
I posted a link to an excellent discussion of the problems of PSA in another thread. The discussion was in response to Scot McKnight defending PSA over at Jesus creed; but the non-PSA responses in the discussion are well worth the read. Here’s the link:
patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed … ild-abuse/
The particularly great responses were provided mainly by Michael Hardin and another poster “FroKid”.
I really enjoyed that conversation Melchi 
- and I like Mike Hardin anyway. I guess in terms of this lecture the central issue for me is that it assumes and appeals to an ecumenical audience but actually it is quite rigidly Calvinist in doctrine especially in it’s view of PSA.
Here’s my sweep up -
The modernist Enlightenment project also rejected authority in the sense of the suppression of free enquiry and the persecution of dissent by the Catholic Church and by magisterial Protestantism.
A plurality of views regarding God seems to be evident at all time s when freedom of through was not persecuted – we even have evidence a flowering of wide hoping and hopeful universalism in fourteenth century England just a the point when the Catholic Church’s magisterial power was diluted by a number of factors. So this all depends on what is meant by ‘ the rejection of authority’.
Before the middle of the twentieth century across Europe culture was essentially Christian but there were always divergences in interpretation of Christianity. Metaphysics has never been an exact science because while I do not deny that there are absolutes (i know that there are) I think we are limited in our ability to grasp these entire (because we do not posses gnosis). Today it is mostly hard-line Calvinists who make the claim for an absolute and authoritative body of metaphysics and very authoritarian and extremely right wing Catholics. (The metaphysical certainties of the extreme left in Marxist dialectics are not at the moment – one of the big shows in town)
It is and always has been troubling to many and rejected or ameliorated by many (including Orthodox Muslim Scholars) (see Islam and the Fate of Others by Hasan Khalil) Those who aren’t troubled by it are often Muslim extremists
In Christian universalism you have an ontological communion between God and creature in that creatures are made in the image of God and restored to the likeness of God - but you do not have ontological union. Of course there is room for sin.
The message of American individualism also can be traced back to Calvinist notions of election and the Calvinist protestant work ethic – so the ‘narrative’ is composed of many strands. When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote his book on ‘Self Reliance’ a man called Samuel Smiles wrote a book entitled ‘Self Help’ in Britain which was completely in line with Protestant work ethic ideals (so these books were part of the zeitgeist). Emerson was a pantheist who was partially influenced by Boehme but also by Eastern religions. Christian Universalists are not pantheists. Obviously if you look at a book like Hosea Ballou’s ‘Cloud of Witness’ you will find quotations from transcendentalists – but on this site we have been careful to make a distinction between Christian universalist and people who were merely anti-hell in some way.
Ok let’s have a look at this one?
[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 his 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.
MM I think we see this if you love a child. If you come back to the house and someone is harming your child 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.
G.H. 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 our 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 God 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 and 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.
There are an awful lot of assumptions in this discussion I’d pick up on. Just for starters -
GF (Geoff Fulkerson) seems like a nice guy and I warm to his ‘trajectories’ and ‘teasing out of implications’. Indeed he seems to have stumbled upon something in his statement here; namely that Bonheoffer is criticising people who think that they are saved by subscribing to a confessional statement when he exposes the idea/attitude of ‘cheap grace’ (that’s correct). Also Geoff could have continued by saying that Bonheoffer does not seems to be talking about PSA here or about eternal damnation here (as Dr McClymond has implied in his lecture). Rather he is talking about the cost of discipleship - of taking up our cross in obedience to Christ and serving him as opposed to living a life of complacency and self satisfaction (as many German Christians did under the Nazis including both conservative evangelicals and theological liberals). This is what Bonheoffer meant by giving grace to ourselves - and he had some hopes of apocatastasis and certainly hope beyond that expressed by Rob Bell despite the situation of evil almost triumphant that confronted him. It’s true that liberal Christians made easy use of Bonheoffer in the 1960s - but to use him now as if he were an ECT believing evangelical is simply astonishing.
As for churches in which the cross is taken down - are these universalist churches? As far as I know the cross is not popular in some prosperity gospel mega churches - certainly the idea of taking up one’s cross to follow Christ is not. I have more than a sneaking suspicion that prosperity gospel churches are not necessarily connected to Christian universalism.
This could become a form of cheap grace - God hates my enemies but is very protective towards me and pleased with me because he has elected me. It is based on marginalising what Jesus says ’ You have one Father in Heaven and all men are brothers’ (surely ) and of course ’ Love your enemies’. The Sermon on the Mount doesn’t get a look in here.
My response might well be intense reactive indignation and wrath to protect my child. But I hope I would not torture the person after I had subdued them and rejoice in their agony. And anyway this is predicated on the idea that not all of us are God’s children. But for those of us who believe that we are all God’s children the proper analogy would concern our response if we came back to the house and found one of our children harming another one of our children, The trouble with Jonathan Edward’s advice is that it may well lead us to hate and even kill other people for the greater glory of God.
I find this very odd. Perhaps it is because I am British 
Does anyone else have any thoughts?
Regarding Mel Gibson’s film – as I’ve said before and believe I am most justified in saying - it’s based on black and white oversimplification of history in the first place. The British had become tyrants in America and had to go but… The scene where the redcoats Americans into a church and torch it never happened – the Nazis committed this atrocity. Also the picture he paints of a united country fighting evil is a myth – many African Americans and Native Americans fought with the British (because they knew they were not necessarily going to get a better deal under their new masters - depending on where in America they were living). And the British fought a half hearted campaign because the English Parliament was divided about the war with the Whigs supporting Independence and it wasn’t a terrible war like the American Civil war or the English Civil War. So it’s based on Mel going myth making to stir ancestral factions (which he does so well). Also as is Mel Gibson’s wont it is excessive in its gratuitous violence (although I don’t think it combines Mel’s other demons of misogyny and anti-Semitism this time). There is something a bit false and manipulative about the movie and I can’t for the life of me bring myself to see the Patriot as a type of Christ anyway. But there are other issues here I think -
I reflect that God didn’t send a legion of angels to wipe out the Romans and Jews when his own Son was crucified. That’s important to me. As for the Book of Revelation - there are other ways of interpreting it than in the light of a Mel Gibson movie.
We do still have a sense of salvation as rescue/freedom. Rescue from death and constructing your life around fear of death, rescue from egocentricity and hatred and rivalry, rescue from oppression and from being an oppressor for starters. There is nothing to suggest to me that the cult of self actualisation and personal authenticity afflicts Universalists any more than it does ECT Christians today (this is just a case of blaming everything wrong with Church and society on the universalists). As for seminars about life skills – I’m sure they have their place – but again I’ve no reason to think these are particular to Universalist churches. A great deal of self actualisation and life enhancement seems to go on at Mark Driscoll’s Church for example.
Kierkegaard - who was a hopeful Universalist – had a bleak view of life. A lot of his personal crises about saying Yes’ or ‘No’ to God had to do with his torturous relationship with a woman that he loved and thought that he had to give up to dedicate himself to God (and some say he didn’t exactly treat her well). Christ is both our teacher and our saviour IMHO – both things are true and it is perilous to overemphasise either. Funnily enough it was Kierkegaard’s very sense of destitution and existential desperation that lead him to universal hope. He was confident that if God could save wretched little him he would save everyone.
Any thoughts? 
His first ‘either-or’ sentence is baloney. (As a matter of practice, my antennae go up whenever I see an ‘either-or’ sentence)
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I don’t think we here, for example, marginalize hell - we talk about it a lot. What he is saying is that we ‘marginalize’ the horrid caricatures of hell, we all know what those are, and by ‘marginalize’ he means we don’t interpret hell in terms of the caricatures, which he does NOT SEE as caricatures?
He should have said " Churches that do not preach about hell as it really is - a place of ECT, where, to show His Glory, God punishes those forever who were unable to come to faith because of their sinful nature inherited from Adam (etc) - those churches will preach differently. They EITHER have to follow Marcion by attributing the OT to the acts of a demonic demiurge, OR be ambiguous.
From the congregation: "But - what if they don’t do either of those things, but instead preach the scriptures in their fulness, with ultimate reconciliation as the goal of a loving God? And, and…why can they not just interpret the Old Testament in the way it should be, following perhaps the lead of Wm. Ellery Channing’s methodology - instead of going to the extremes YOU put out as the only possible choices???
Murmurs amongst the faithful…
Anyway, the whole paragraph is a mess of muddy and dishonest rhetoric. Forget I said dishonest…
I completely agree Dave –
Pastor Hieston is posing a false dilemma here. Only hard line Calvinists – following the lead of John Calvin - see the relationship between the Old and the New Testament in this way. The Church Fathers who actually fought the real Marcionites did not use the Old Testament in the way it is used in these discussions. The wider Church – including the ECT teaching parts – does not use the Old Testament in this way.
I also think it is in this discussion particularly that another hard line Calvinists theme is very clearly implicit – namely double predestination and the corollary that God hates most of his creatures from the beginning and loves only his elect.
Hi Dick
First off, well done for your marathon transcription effort. If I ever need an amanuensis you’ll be the first person I call .
As has been pointed out by yourself, Dave, James and others, the anti-Universalist arguments being wheeled out by the less than dynamic trio are old, shallow, lazy and borderline dishonest. McCylmond says:
This is, quite frankly, tosh. Robin Parry’s exegesis of Revelation in TEU is careful, rigorous, scholarly - and very convincing, especially in its alignment with the wider meta-narrative of the Bible story as a whole. McClymond is the one performing exegetical somersaults, as it is he who ignores the triumphal Universalist image with which Revelation draws to a close, 21:23-26:
“The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendour into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The glory and honour of the nations will be brought into it.”
The new Jerusalem, a city whose gates are never shut, who is always welcoming the Kings of the Earth - they who committed adultery with the whore of Babylon. Irrevocable judgement? I think not.
As for Universalism evacuating our decision-making, this is another tired old ECT cliche. As we have explored on other threads, nowhere does the Bible put a time-limit on God’s offer of mercy and forgiveness for sinners. Quite the contrary, it explicitly avows the everlasting nature of his mercy. The majority of modern theologians accept this, hence the popularity of the Lewisian idea of the gates of hell being locked on the inside. And anyway, for a Calvinist to complain about us being let off making decisions about our eternal destiny is pretty rich!
Keep up the good work matey.
Love
Johnny
Yes Johnny I agree ; and this comes out even more n the exegesis of Revelation given in their discussion on the New Testament Doctrine of God’s Mercy (which doesn’t mention the New Testament apart from the Book for Revelation rather confusingly, a book that Calvin himself pushed to the margins i understand),. In this other discussion God’s wide and forgiving mercy to the nations as prophesied in the Book of Isaiah is acknowledged. But Dr McClymond focuses on the irrevocable judgement on Babylon that is not included in Isaiah’s vision of mercy and contends that this irrevocable judgment that the City will remain desolate is confirmed in Revelation. But he does not amplify what this might mean. Does it mean that the people in the City of Babylon are placed outside of God’s mercy forever while the people of all other Empires are somehow included in God’s mercy? Since Dr McClymond seems wedded to a form of proof text literalism this seems like a natural literal conclusion. However it doesn’t appear to be what he means for this hope would be not universal but at the least very wide and inclusive. Or does it mean as some futurists speculate that Babylon will be rebuilt and destroyed again? Even in this scenario the hope is still far too inclusive. Personally i think both interpretations rather miss the point of what Babylon stands for. But you are right the Kings of the Earth who were under the sway of the Whore of Babylon eventually bring their riches into the open gated City and receive healing – this is very important. I guess that if pressed Dr McClymond would have to say that the Kings of the Earth only represent the elect from the kingdoms of the earth and Babylon is the Empire of the reprobate of the earth at all times and places – but this would take some very subtle exegetical somersaults to substantiate (and Dr McClymond doesn’t bother us with exegesis here).
What do you think of this contention? What he’s saying about McClaren here picks up on what he says about Rob Bell elsewhere: namely that these two subtly and insidiously subvert orthodox eschatology by problematising it in the readers mind rather than directly challenging it. (and this seems part and parcel of his line of attack against Robin Parry also who, in the main lecture, is portentously mentioned as having published pseudonymously at first and having been interviewed once with his voice disguised . Dr MyClymond claims that in ‘A Generous Orthodoxy – a book I haven’t read – Brian McClaren rejects inclusivism and exclusivism but doesn’t make it clear where he stands (in the same way he claims that Rob Bell merely puts forward alternative eschatologies in ‘Love Wins’ without coming down on any side completely). Also early on in A Generous Orthodoxy Brian McClaren mentions the doctrine of hell and a few pages later he has subtly shifts to talking about ‘the problem of hell’.
Any thoughts?
I thought I’d bring up something about the “post-modernism” that is disparaged in the discussions. I wondered why they’d latched on to that particularly and why that might be associated with the Gnostic “God–creation–back to God” narrative and may have found a clue where that’s coming from…
I’m currently reading “In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World” eds Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke. I just started reading the chapter by David Ray Griffin, “Panentheism: A Postmodern Revelation”. Many of his books have “postmodern” in the titles, e.g. God and Religion in the Postmodern World: Essays in Postmodern Theology (Constructive Postmodern Thought).Griffin is a process theologian in the mold of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. This type of panentheism is certainly not compatible with Christian orthodoxy in any sense and the “gnostic” narrative above does seem prominent in the work of process theologians.
I really wonder if that’s where McClymond et al’s idea of postmodern theology being derived from"gnosticism" is coming from…
I really wonder if that’s where McClymond et al’s idea of postmodern theology being derived from"gnosticism" is coming from…
It’s difficult to know exactly what he means Steve. I sometimes think I’ve grasped what he might mean – but then it just slips away.
Christian Universalism isn’t Gnosticism and was not derived from the early Gnostic heresies – this much is clear. All schools of ancient Gnosticism that we know of did not envisage the return to Unity in terms of universal salvation which is the only important issue here. The hermetic school which wasn’t as negative about the material world as the full blown Gnostic schools did not envisage universal as salvation either.
Postmodern theology is??? 
Well if it is process theology it has some sort of emphasis on divine immanence and a dynamic of change taking place in God I guess. So Dr McClymond would say that this is evidence of the breakdown of metaphysical platonic absolutes and that we can trace this back to Hegel who was influenced by hermeticsm and by Boehme. But none of this is clearly connected to Christian Universalism.
The only thing he could justifiably mean with his use of ‘post -modern’ is that conservative evangelicalism in the USA in post modern culture has finally also been assailed by doubts about absolutes – like irrevocable hell - whereas before now American conservative evangelicals had been immune to this questioning. Leave out the ‘Gnostic’ word and this more modest claim is something that could be usefully discussed. But even this is contestable – as if American evangelical and revivalist culture, however distinctive it is, has ever been completely immune from a wider and more diverse religious culture in America. I don’t think so somehow.
Does me trying to make sense make any sense to you Steve?
I agree, Dick. Perhaps he sees modern Christian Universalists such as Robin Parry as following directly from Victorian universalists like FD Maurice and George MacDonald who were influenced by the Romantics who were influenced by Hegel who was influenced by Boehme and sees the emphasis on the divine immanence and connects it with Process theology and postmodernism. (I haven’t really seen an emphasis in divine immanence in Robin Parry or most other current universalists other than the Eastern Orthodox minority.)
Would also wonder if they look at McClaren and “The Emergent Church” as postmodern…whatever McClaren’s theology might be (he may or may not be panentheist, but probably is.)
Robin Parry ? Dr McClymond speculates that he is probably an Anglican. If that is so Dr McClymond should know that Anglican universalism is not a post modern phenomenon. To dates back to the abrogation of the 42nd Article on hell by the Elizabethan Church and the Anglican Burial service which gives comforting assurance of the sure hope of resurrection to life of the deceased. Calvinists during Elizabeth’s time found this Orignenistic and petitioned parliament to have the burial service suppressed and indeed had no times for burial services and comforting the bereaved in any sense. Origen also influenced Anglican irenicism through Erasmus’ Annotations on the Greek New testament - in which Origen is cited often although not on apocatastasis - which was required reading for Anglican clergymen during Edward’s and Elizabeth’s reign. Origenist chic goes back a long way in the Church of England
As far as I know Brian McClaren is now more than anything else a Girardian (but he still waffles a lot).
Yes they would see the emergent conversation as post modern. As far as I understand the emergent Churches seek to have a conversation/dialogue with contemporary culture. But hard Calvinists will always push a ‘Christ against culture’ line rather than a ‘Christ transforming culture’ line – and this can lead to theocratic imperialism.