I was (and still am) a very big fan of C. S. Lewis – I had dubbed all his theological books to tape and listened to them on trips, debated using his techniques (often discussing theology with some pretty heavy hitters pro and con thanks to Dr. Victor Reppert being impressed enough with a review of Miracles I had written for Amazon to invite me into his emailing list, back in the days before there were weblogs etc.). I was almost as ignorant of universalism as I could possibly be, but I at least respected Lewis’ suggestions of post-mortem salvation, and was kind of fascinated that the man he regarded as his Teacher had been regarded as a universalist during his lifetime (although not having read MacDonald in the slightest I accepted that Lewis was properly ‘interpreting’ him in The Great Divorce to really have been an annihilationist). I also noted with some curiosity that Lewis basically said if we only had St. Paul’s epistles Christianity would have been universalistic, but that Jesus taught otherwise so we ought to interpret Paul along the line of Jesus (or if there was indeed a conflict follow Jesus instead of Paul).
I thought it was a bit strange that Lewis seemed to go for annihilationism sometimes, and couldn’t really figure out why he was doing that – it seemed to have something to do with God being intrinsically love in trinitarian theology, which I wished Lewis had developed more because that looked like an approach to theology that would have helped flesh out his Miracles: A Preliminary Study. But when I thought about it, annihilation didn’t seem at all consonant with God being intrinsically love. Also, it seemed like in two separate chapters of The Problem of Pain Lewis totally reversed his position on why we could and should trust God to keep on acting to save sinners from sin, although at the time I hadn’t thought things out enough to spell out why I had trouble there.
Anyway, as a personal exercise which I thought might be of some use in apologetics or evangelism, I decided to try working out a progressing metaphysical argument, similar to what Lewis did in M:aPS but with more detail and with some of his topical order switched around to improve the logical progression. I was pretty sure I could get as far as his Theistic Argument From Reason; and I wanted to test out whether his hints about how the Father and Son related in the Trinity (and to creation) could be used to take the overall argument farther than he did.
I started that project late in 1999, and while working on the chapter demonstrating why we should not and even cannot really claim all ideas are equally true I thought that was what ‘universalism’ was about. (Not that I thought Lewis had thought MacD and St. Paul of all people believed that; I’m just talking about how scanty and fragmented my ideas on it were at the time.)
By the time I finished Section Four, on the relationship of the Trinity to morality, I realized I had arrived at a conclusion that I ought to expect God to persistently and originally act toward saving all sinners from sin until He gets it done. Every time I thought of a principle objection to that, I realized I was denying some point of trinitarian theism (or at least supernaturalistic theism). That’s still true today, by the way: I don’t think I have ever found a principle objection to universal salvation that didn’t sooner or later involve denying a point of orthodox trinitarian theism.
Of course I knew plenty of scriptural objections, or thought I did; but that didn’t bother me much because what I had arrived at could still technically allow a never-ending stalemate where God didn’t simply force someone to be good but neither did God ever give up trying to lead someone to be good (which would necessarily involve inflicting some kind of inconveniences on them, thus judgmental punishments, with the Holy Spirit being the unquenchable fire.) I realized then that Lewis must have gotten to that point but couldn’t figure out why God would keep at it if He knew from overarching omniscience He was never going to succeed for some sinners; but Lewis hadn’t ever worked out his nascent trinitarian theology either. So he was forced to simply turn around and deny something he had strongly argued for out of his nascent trinitarian theology: that if we expect God to quit we aren’t thinking high enough of God yet, especially God being intrinsically and essentially love.
I had a dim notion at the time that I was somehow combining proper Arminian emphases with proper Calvinistic emphases, which pleased me a lot because growing up in a Southern Baptist Church I was taught to respect both sides (though our congregation skewed more Arminian). It shortly afterward occurred to me that when Lewis called St. Paul a universalist because he thought God would save everyone, this must have been what he meant, and it didn’t take me long to run across those portions of the epistles since I had an idea what to look for now. This naturally made me curious about George MacDonald, and I found some very nice hardback bound books of his theology (the Unspoken Sermon series plus Hope of the Gospel and Miracles of Our Lord – the latter of which especially pleased me because I had discovered that Lewis had summarized it for his climactic three chapters of M:aPS). And reading MacD with great delight, I saw that while he was far from Lewis’ level at putting together metaphysical principles, he did strongly believe in universal salvation. I could see why he believed it, and actually could see better why to believe it from trinitarian theology, but MacD never addressed why he didn’t think Jesus taught against it. (Keeping in mind, that didn’t bother me because I thought it just meant God was revealing the final outcome to be that there would be no final outcome, so to speak.)
I was quiet about this for a few years while I chewed it over in the back of my mind and otherwise made great use of various results of the exercise for trinitarian apologetic purposes. (The 3rd edition of the book can be downloaded for free in my signature below, Sword to the Heart. By the time I revised the text to the 3rd edition my conclusions were far more explicitly universalistic, btw.) I never move quickly on something this big, and a lot of my attention was also taken up with historical apologetics which led in turn to preparing a Gospel harmonization exercise. For that purpose I picked up several Bibles with close connections to the Greek texts, including the USB/Nestle-Aland Greek texts (with Metzger’s commentary notes), the NIV Greek-English interlinear, the Concordant Literal Translation (which I very much appreciated), and even Green’s Textus Receptus (which aside from providing an alternate textual witness, although I couldn’t find his text critical comments, provided two very useful literal and super-literal translations). To that I added my old NASB and a new Holman translation (which was just starting to be heavily promoted in the Southern Baptist Church).
Armed with all this, I took a break from trying to edit another book, and spent a season plotting out narrative and thematic connections between the Gospel pericopes, testing a theory I had developed about sorting the events based on more or less explicit time-place cues in the language of the authors. (i.e. where two or more authors related what seemed to be the same event, give chronological priority to the one who had the clearest time/place cues in introducing its connection to other material. I’m the sort of person who thinks this counts as “taking a break” from another project. 
) I was quite pleased with the results and published them online at the Cadre Journal (over two Christmas-to-Easter seasons) as The King of Stories (which you can also find a link to below).
Along the way I had to decide what kind of wording to use, and did my best to stick with more literal translations, mostly to help provide a bit more of an archaic and early ‘style’ (along with a varying rhythmical scansion style that I gathered was typical of how the material often sounded in the original Greek or Aramaic to help with memorization).
As an unexpected side-effect, though, the project removed or unsettled some of my grounds for scriptural objections to the idea that God would finally succeed in saving all sinners from sin. Not entirely removed, not by a long shot, but it taught me some habits that I continued to apply when studying the scriptures, and over the next several years as I was working on other smaller projects I would be increasingly not-surprised to see snarls unsnarl.
In autumn 2008 I was invited by the men starting the Evangelical Universalist forum to write as a guest author and help administrate the site, specifically because I tied universal salvation (which I was publicly talking about by then) as a logical corollary to ortho-trin; and I realized I had better not be slowly puttering around at my own pace anymore, but focusing down to a much more systematic study of scriptural data and implications. Well, if I was going to do it, I figured I had better do it the same way I went about trying to figure out what the scriptures were saying about the relationships between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; whereupon I realized I had only been slowly puttering around at my own pace on that, too. So for practice I worked on that more systematically for a while, and spent the next few years putting those precepts into practice when analyzing for soteriology. It didn’t take long for me to discover the same techniques I thought were most respectable and careful when putting together data on theology more generally, led to increasing indications God would indeed succeed at saving all sinners from sin when applied to soteriology (salvation and condemnation). Many of the contributors here at the forum helped with that a lot, too, because they often came up with scriptural questions and observations (not always in favor of universal salvation) for me to chew over, publicly or privately.
And so here I am! 
I had actually meant to spend this Saturday morning working on a biographic introduction to a compilation book I’ve been preparing in the back of my head for years and years, and providentially you asked us “what got you here”. Yay! 
Copy, paste…
Thankfully I can now clearly see how God has used the painful experiences, and the 
