Here are two poetic extracts
The first is actually prose – but very poetical prose. It is an observation by Sojourner Truth concerning the appearance of Rapture Theology in the nineteenth century (the same currently popularised in the ‘Left Behind Series’ ). She says -
**You seem to be expecting to go to some parlour away up somewhere, and when the wicked shall be burnt, you are coming back to walk in triumph over their ashes – this is to be your New Jerusalem!! Now I can’t see anything so very nice in that, coming back to …a world covered with the ashes of the wicked. Besides, if the Lord comes and burns – as you say he will – I am not going away; I am going to stay here and stand the fire, like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego! And Jesus will walk with me through the fire, and keep me from harm. **
– quoted by Barbara R. Rossing in Compassionate Eschatology; The Future As Friend)
I know that Sojourner Truth will be familiar to you if you are American. We need to know more about her in the UK (she was an escaped slave who became a campaigner for abolition and women’s rights etc. – and she sounds utterly remarkable)
The second is from William Langland’s dream vision poem ‘Piers Plowman’. Langland was writing in the second half of the calamitous fourteenth century – a time of the Great Plague/Black Death, and of social breakdown; a time when there were two rival Popes and many thought the Last Days were upon them. Yet in Langland’s vision of the Last Judgement Christ speaks and says -
**Then I shall come as a king, crowned with angels
And have all men’s souls out of hell
Demons great and small shall stand before me
And be at my bidding where I will
My kinship demands that I have mercy
On man , for we are all brethren
In blood, if not in baptism
My righteousness and right shall rule
In hell, and mercy over all mankind before me
In heaven. I were an unkind king
If I did not help my kin.**
(Piers Plowman, Passus 18.399)
So for Langland Christ, through the incarnation, has ‘kinship’ with all human beings; and because of this kinship will not leave anyone to perdition – nether those who are kin through baptism (Christians) nor those who are kin through blood (pagans) for this would be ‘unkind’- that is it woudl be against both divine and human nature.
Langland was writing at roughly the same period when Julian of Norwich affirmed that **‘All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.’ **
Have a very happy Christmas 