Universalism Is ‘Alive and Well’

00:00:07.000 | Dr. McClymon, thank you for your time. I'm going to check the audio levels here for a minute and just have you talk.

00:00:16.000 | Tell me, what books besides the Bible have been most impactful for you?

00:00:20.000 | Oh, gosh. I don't know. That really is hard.

00:00:24.000 | Well, how about one would be the dissertation on the end for which God created the world.

00:00:29.000 | That was the focus of half of my doctoral dissertation.

00:00:33.000 | And when Piper came out with his new edition of that, I wrote him a letter.

00:00:37.000 | But I just said, "Wow, this is like this neglected text and here you've highlighted it."

00:00:43.000 | And I just was very taken. There was almost no writing on it.

00:00:47.000 | I mean, it just dropped out of sight.

00:00:50.000 | Everyone was always talking about freedom of the will, which obviously is important.

00:00:53.000 | But Sidney Ahlstrom at Yale said that the dissertation on the end was kind of the essence of Edward's theology.

00:01:02.000 | It's kind of distilled down the God-entranced vision, I think, to use the language of the book later.

00:01:09.000 | All right. Well, we are recording. Thank you for joining us.

00:01:13.000 | Yeah, that book is titled, I think, "God's Passion for His Glory, Living the Vision of Jonathan Edwards."

00:01:20.000 | Such a great book, fundamental to Edwards and Piper and everything we do at Desiring God.

00:01:26.000 | But we're not here to talk about Edwards this time.

00:01:28.000 | No, we are here to talk to you, Michael J. McClymon, about your new book.

00:01:33.000 | We talked six years ago, I think it was.

00:01:35.000 | And in passing, then, you said that you were starting a new project about the history of universalism.

00:01:42.000 | And I had no idea that that would become a massive two-volume magnum opus, a 1,400-page work titled, "The Devil's Redemption, A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism."

00:01:58.000 | Now out from Baker Academic, an incredible achievement.

00:02:02.000 | So here we are again. Thank you for joining us.

00:02:05.000 | Talk to us about Christian universalism.

00:02:08.000 | First off, what do you mean when you talk about Christian universalism?

00:02:12.000 | Well, first of all, starting with the word "universalism," "universalism" quite simply, which has different meanings in different contexts.

00:02:19.000 | But in the context of theology, it means quite simply the idea that in the end, everyone is saved.

00:02:25.000 | That would mean all human beings, every human individual without exception.

00:02:29.000 | And it could also be extended, of course, to the fallen angels.

00:02:34.000 | The unfallen angels would not be saved, but fallen angels, Satan, and the demons would be saved as well if you hold to a full-bore universalist vision.

00:02:42.000 | Christian universalism may add something to that that says that all that salvation occurs in and through Christ.

00:02:50.000 | So Christian universalism, therefore, would be different from an inter-religious universalism, of which there's plenty in the culture now that all roads lead to God and that one need not come through Christ to God.

00:03:03.000 | A Christian universalist says, "No, it has to be through Christ, but somehow through Christ, all will be saved."

00:03:10.000 | When you write, you bring such a vast awareness to a subject.

00:03:15.000 | What are some of the various stripes of this so-called Christian universalism that you've discovered in these years of research?

00:03:23.000 | Well, it is a big story. One of the reasons the book was as long as it is, is that the question of final salvation is intertwining with question of—to a surprising extent, intertwined with things like the doctrine of the Atonement, the question of free will, the question of election.

00:03:42.000 | There's almost no major doctrine that isn't somehow entailed in some way in the discussion of universalism.

00:03:49.000 | I think the current situation is highly eclectic. I say in my book that there are many schools of fish swimming in the universalist pond.

00:03:58.000 | The only thing that many universals have in common is the idea of a final salvation for all, but there are major, major differences between them.

00:04:06.000 | The ways in which you argue some, basing it primarily on human free choice, others on divine election, the Bardian type of universalism or tendency toward universalism would focus on God's overriding purpose that will somehow achieve its aim.

00:04:23.000 | Then there are various forms of agnostic, esoteric universalism in which everyone has a spark of the divine within that is destined to return back to God.

00:04:33.000 | There's a lot of variation, and I actually think that the universals are maybe not aware of how much they differ among themselves.

00:04:41.000 | Yeah. Speaking of Karl Barth, I think you do really fine work in the book showing that his doctrine of election is problematic here, and he essentially codes universalism into the DNA of his soteriology through universal election.

00:04:56.000 | Soga, your book is a massive historical study that spans decades and centuries of trends, but what's the current state of Christian universalism in the West today?

00:05:08.000 | My impression is that the Internet and digital media are very, very prominent today in the promotion of universalism.

00:05:17.000 | There's certainly plenty of books, if one goes to Amazon.com and puts in Christian universalism, there will be lots of popular books.

00:05:24.000 | Many, many of them published within the last 20 years. There's almost this amazing takeoff of new popular literature since about 1999, so in the new millennium.

00:05:34.000 | If you had to look at the world as a whole and find a digital center, a kind of distribution online, it's actually here in Missouri, Herman, Missouri.

00:05:45.000 | There is tentmaker.org, which is a website run by some people connected to a friend of a friend, Gary Amaro.

00:05:54.000 | It's an aggregation site. It's sort of like the drudge of the universalist world because they have lots of links to universalist literature.

00:06:02.000 | My understanding is that Gary Amaro discovered sort of 19th century universalism and then decided, became very intrigued, interested in it.

00:06:10.000 | I think he had been a missionary at one point. I think that's where the tentmaker.org came from, but there's a huge amount of material there.

00:06:16.000 | There's also another site called evangelicaluniversalist.org.

00:06:20.000 | I did the crazy thing. I went into that website and I found there was 100,000 words of comment on an early lecture I gave at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

00:06:29.000 | So I logged in under my own name and suddenly I had dozens and dozens of people shooting questions at me.

00:06:36.000 | It was actually exhausting. I just had to disengage at that point. And I guess, who knows, maybe I'll re-engage at some point after they've looked at the book.

00:06:44.000 | Universalism is alive and well.

00:06:47.000 | It is alive and well. Remarkably, a man in my own congregation took me out to lunch.

00:06:52.000 | This is a wealthy retired businessman, but who had had a house church in his home.

00:06:56.000 | And we're sitting over lunch and then he pulls out an app on his phone and he starts reading from something called the Mirror Bible.

00:07:03.000 | The Mirror Bible says that the only difference between Jesus and us is that Jesus knew and understood his own identity.

00:07:10.000 | So essentially, this is a very much a Gnostic teaching that we all have God within us or are identical to God, that we are eternal in our essential nature.

00:07:19.000 | He started reading from this and this gentleman in my church, who I won't name, but he actually was trying to win my own pastor over to Universalist views.

00:07:29.000 | So this book that I wrote for everyone out there, suddenly it is literally affecting the person right next to me in the pew in my own congregation.

00:07:38.000 | So it struck close to home.

00:07:40.000 | Frightening. I can imagine church leaders hear you tell the story and they want to be proactive to ensure that Universalism doesn't get a foothold in their own churches.

00:07:50.000 | What do you say to pastors? I mean, how do they go about this?

00:07:52.000 | I actually, about a year and a half ago, I got together with 50 local pastors from the greater St. Louis area and I gave them that question of what would be your pastoral response to Universalism.

00:08:03.000 | And what they came up with was actually the same essential response that I did through my own research.

00:08:09.000 | And to put it very briefly, preach the cross. Preach the cross of Christ.

00:08:14.000 | If the cross is preached in its full depth and richness and integrity, then it shows us God's holy hatred and opposition for sin and his profound love that was willing to endure the destructive weight of sin in order for us to be redeemed.

00:08:34.000 | So if you preach the cross rightly and properly, then I think so many theological issues take care of themselves.

00:08:41.000 | And I think one of the reasons that we have Universalism emerging in the church is that we haven't been preaching the cross.

00:08:48.000 | The cross shows us that our salvation did not come cheaply, that it came at a very high price.

00:08:54.000 | And I would recommend John Stott's marvelous book, The Cross of Christ, which really is a multidimensional study that looks at the cross and suffering, the cross and the problem of evil, the cross and the Christian life.

00:09:06.000 | For someone who says, "I'd like to begin putting the cross more at the center of my preaching," that book might give some clues as to how to do that.

00:09:13.000 | Yeah, excellent. What a great book John Stott left us.

00:09:16.000 | But we're out of time today, and I have several questions remaining for you.

00:09:20.000 | So let's pick this up next time on Wednesday so I can ask you specifically about the ways Universalism distorts theology and the gospel of grace.

00:09:28.000 | We'll see you next time.

00:09:30.000 | We'll be joined again with guest Michael McClymon from St. Louis.

00:09:34.000 | I'm your host Tony Reinke. We'll see you on Wednesday.

00:09:37.000 | (end)

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Universalism Is ‘Alive and Well’ — How Do We Oppose It?

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