Universalism Distorts the Grace of God
Chapters
0:00:36 The Devil's Redemption
3:57 Why Did God Make Everything That He Made
4:23 The Full Bucket Paradox
00:00:00.000 | Well, happy 4th of July to everyone in the States.
00:00:07.760 | There's no vacation for the Ask Pastor John podcast.
00:00:10.240 | No way.
00:00:11.240 | We have too much to talk about, but we do have our own fireworks because today we're
00:00:15.520 | in the middle of a conversation about universalism, the distorted theology that says that everyone
00:00:20.020 | will be saved in the end.
00:00:22.360 | It has, this doctrine of universalism has a very long and vast history that stretches
00:00:28.720 | back decades and centuries and millennia.
00:00:31.960 | And that story is now told in a massive two volume, 1400 page book titled The Devil's
00:00:37.920 | Redemption, A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism from Baker Academic.
00:00:44.320 | The author of that book is our guest again, Michael J. McCliman, who joins us from St.
00:00:50.120 | Louis.
00:00:51.120 | Michael, it's good to have you back.
00:00:52.480 | You know, on Monday we were talking about universalism and how the threat remains very
00:00:57.440 | relevant today.
00:00:59.240 | And you mentioned that the doctrine of God is at stake in universalism.
00:01:02.840 | And you even said after writing the book that it was a surprising thing for you to see how
00:01:06.720 | many other doctrines universalism distorts.
00:01:10.720 | So pick it up here.
00:01:12.160 | What are some implied theological entailments of Christian universalism and what are some
00:01:16.600 | of the ways that theology gets skewed in Christian universalism?
00:01:19.720 | Well, if we could start with just with the doctrine of God, to my surprise, I found that
00:01:25.280 | from ancient times onward, beginning with the Gnostics of the second and third century,
00:01:31.200 | and then Jewish and Christian Kabbalah, and some of the so-called esoteric views and modern
00:01:37.800 | esoteric theories, is that there was a concept of God.
00:01:44.360 | First of all, that God is not independent of the world.
00:01:46.920 | God is dependent upon the world, or that God created the world in order to evolve in and
00:01:53.320 | through the world.
00:01:54.480 | It's almost like God was a spirit in need of a body and the world became his body and
00:01:58.640 | that God is enriched.
00:02:00.400 | And in the beginning, God is incomplete.
00:02:03.760 | By creating the world, he completes himself.
00:02:05.880 | It's almost like God and the world are married to one another.
00:02:09.640 | And this is a view that sometimes, I mean, there are different terms for it.
00:02:13.720 | This may sound like process theology to some.
00:02:16.000 | Some use the term panentheism.
00:02:18.200 | But actually, it's an ancient view that goes all the way back to the early centuries of
00:02:25.640 | the church.
00:02:27.080 | But this is a view that is unworthy of God.
00:02:29.920 | It is unworthy of God.
00:02:31.400 | It is inconsistent with the fundamental biblical and creedal principle of creation from nothing.
00:02:38.200 | Creation from nothing implies that everything that exists other than God is radically dependent
00:02:43.200 | upon God's will.
00:02:44.920 | So to use a mathematical equation, you could say the world minus God equals nothing.
00:02:51.240 | If you took God away, the world would cease.
00:02:53.640 | God minus the world equal God.
00:02:56.580 | God is not diminished by the disappearance of the world.
00:02:59.960 | But there's some modern theologians that disagree with that.
00:03:02.440 | They think that if the world were taken away, God would be deficient and lacking.
00:03:07.640 | So we need to recover, actually, a sense of the freedom and lordship of God.
00:03:14.000 | And I think this has some deep connections culturally with a rejection of authority and
00:03:19.080 | the idea.
00:03:20.080 | I mean, there's some modern theologians who speak of human beings as co-creators of the
00:03:24.640 | world with God.
00:03:26.720 | And if you look in all Scripture, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, the word creation
00:03:32.360 | never has any grammatical subject to it other than God.
00:03:37.220 | God alone creates.
00:03:39.400 | It's a prerogative of God.
00:03:40.580 | So it's a great mistake, exegetically speaking, to begin to think and speak of ourselves as
00:03:45.920 | creators alongside of God.
00:03:47.760 | >> Adam: Amen.
00:03:48.760 | God is perfect bliss in himself in the absence of creatures.
00:03:53.560 | >> David: Right.
00:03:54.560 | >> Adam: Yeah.
00:03:55.560 | And you know, I love to ask my kids this question.
00:03:58.120 | Like, why did God make everything that he made?
00:04:02.040 | Because it's the kind of question that really diagnoses a lot of things and leads to some
00:04:05.240 | really great conversations with them.
00:04:07.040 | So I'll pose the same question to you, because you take this up in the book, actually, as
00:04:11.340 | one of those theological things that gets mixed up and muddled in universalism.
00:04:15.680 | It's a hard question to get right, but how do you answer it?
00:04:18.000 | >> David: It is a difficult question to grapple with because there seems to be a paradox.
00:04:23.760 | This is sometimes called the full bucket paradox.
00:04:25.960 | If God's bucket of glory was absolutely full, then why would God need—God could not add
00:04:32.880 | anything to his own glory by creating the world.
00:04:35.360 | And so it would seem that there's no purpose in creation.
00:04:38.840 | And so one way to think of that visually is imagine that bucket full of water, but you
00:04:43.040 | put a hose in it and turn the hose on, and suddenly the bucket overflows.
00:04:47.160 | So one way to understand this is the world is an overflow of the goodness, not a result
00:04:52.260 | of deficiency within God.
00:04:54.440 | Like God was lonely or God was lacking, but no, God was so full of goodness that that
00:04:59.440 | goodness overflowed.
00:05:01.120 | And you get this sense in some of the classic theologians like Augustine, who says, "Because
00:05:05.320 | God is good, therefore you exist."
00:05:08.040 | And this is very much Edward's theology.
00:05:09.720 | He even uses the image of a fountain overflowing.
00:05:12.400 | Obviously, that could be misinterpreted.
00:05:14.840 | He doesn't have an impersonal idea of God.
00:05:16.920 | God is a personal creator, but he's struggling for language to kind of express the inexpressible
00:05:22.080 | because we are very much at the limits of what we can say or imagine when we begin talking
00:05:27.720 | about God's reason for creating.
00:05:29.760 | >> Adam: Amen.
00:05:30.760 | Yeah, and yet without creation becoming an accident of some sort of divine mistake, but
00:05:35.760 | creation emerging with a plan and a goal for creation settled right from the beginning.
00:05:40.080 | >> David: Right.
00:05:41.080 | >> Adam: Yeah, so universalism distorts God and his purposes.
00:05:43.920 | Give us specific examples of how universalism distorts grace.
00:05:47.760 | >> David: Well, the great irony is that the effort to extend grace to all persons ends
00:05:54.280 | up undermining grace to any persons.
00:05:57.000 | And that's not, it's counterintuitive.
00:05:59.880 | That requires some explanation.
00:06:01.520 | People could read the book for the fuller explanation.
00:06:03.360 | Because you'd think, well, if one certain number of people receive salvation, a thousand
00:06:09.240 | receive salvation, and then 5,000 people being saved is five times better, and you'd think,
00:06:15.640 | well, why wouldn't we just extend that in our mind indefinitely to everyone?
00:06:20.120 | But when you look at the reason, the rationale given by the different universalist thinkers
00:06:25.760 | for salvation, you end up in just about every case undermining the principle of grace.
00:06:32.680 | There's the idea that I am saved because I am divine.
00:06:36.520 | That's the hardcore Gnostic idea.
00:06:38.480 | We have the divinity within us.
00:06:40.240 | I use the analogy of the helium balloon in someone's chest.
00:06:43.720 | The moment they die, that balloon sort of leaves, you know, and it escapes, it ascends
00:06:47.800 | heavenward.
00:06:48.800 | Well, if salvation happens that way because of a natural property that we all have as
00:06:53.480 | human beings, this divine element within us, then obviously there would be no need for
00:07:00.120 | a Savior.
00:07:01.120 | There'd be no need for grace.
00:07:03.040 | There's another version of universalism, I'm saved because I'm human.
00:07:06.760 | And I think that they're both esoteric thinkers.
00:07:10.280 | I think there's even an element in Karl Barth's idea of like an eternally realized incarnation,
00:07:18.040 | that Jesus Christ is eternal.
00:07:19.840 | This is a very abstruse point in the interpretation of Barth's church dogmatics.
00:07:24.300 | But if God and humanity have always been joined together in some sense, well, then we would
00:07:29.120 | be saved just because you're human.
00:07:30.880 | Again, why would there be a need for faith, repentance, obedience?
00:07:34.880 | And wouldn't God be almost obligated then to save everyone?
00:07:40.280 | Wouldn't salvation be entitlement?
00:07:42.800 | There's another version of universalism that I'm saved because I suffer.
00:07:46.840 | That's the idea of a kind of purgatory after death where everyone expiates their own sins.
00:07:52.920 | The Russian theologian, Sergei Bulgakov, said there is no free forgiveness.
00:07:58.160 | This is like a direct quote.
00:08:00.240 | Everyone expiates without remainder all of their own sins.
00:08:04.080 | It's a shocking statement.
00:08:05.480 | And he's considered an outstanding Russian theologian of the 20th century, but my gosh,
00:08:11.680 | what was the cross for?
00:08:13.240 | I mean, this teaching is directly in competition with the idea of an atoning death of Jesus
00:08:18.800 | on the cross.
00:08:19.800 | So the only other version of universalism that's left to try to preserve grace is just
00:08:26.080 | say that God just reverses everything, every choice we've made.
00:08:31.240 | That everyone at the moment they die, even the mass murderer, as he's shooting down
00:08:34.640 | his victims and suddenly he's shot dead, he just goes immediately to be with God.
00:08:38.360 | God just changes his character at the moment of death.
00:08:40.800 | But that's sometimes called ultra-universalism because it holds that everyone goes immediately
00:08:46.680 | to be with God.
00:08:47.860 | But that's a view that's so radical it undermines all the significance of our moral
00:08:53.000 | and spiritual choices in this life.
00:08:54.840 | It even seems to make the present life kind of a charade.
00:08:58.840 | And many universalists, therefore, have been purgationists.
00:09:02.400 | They believed in postmortem suffering because they just thought, "We can't believe that
00:09:07.840 | everyone is ready to be with God in heaven."
00:09:10.660 | So that's the dilemma that the universalists can't resolve.
00:09:13.680 | Either you hold to ultra-universalism, which empties our moral choices of meaning, or else
00:09:19.440 | you suffer to make expiation or atonement for your own sins.
00:09:23.120 | In that case, you undermine grace.
00:09:24.960 | There isn't a good answer in terms of universalism.
00:09:27.360 | Yeah, this distortion of grace is very significant.
00:09:31.040 | And your book has guts.
00:09:33.360 | And by that I mean you refuse to avoid the reality of God's wrath.
00:09:38.480 | In your book, I counted nearly 800 explicit mentions of God's wrath, His judgment, and
00:09:43.920 | vengeance.
00:09:44.920 | Oh, I didn't realize that.
00:09:46.160 | Yeah, it's all over.
00:09:47.160 | And I read a lot of books, and this emphasis is atypical, to say the least.
00:09:52.500 | So how much of universalism thriving in Western Christianity is—how much of that is the
00:09:58.080 | result of God's wrath simply disappearing from contemporary Christian music and disappearing
00:10:03.900 | from the sermons and the books of influential preachers and authors and theologians?
00:10:07.440 | Well, I think that's a very good point, Tony.
00:10:10.600 | I think that what happened—I mean, to talk about the American evangelical context from
00:10:15.160 | the 1980s, James Davison Hunter talked about what he called an "ethics of civility"
00:10:21.040 | to the younger generation.
00:10:22.040 | These were people who were in their 20s back then, and they'd be in their 50s and 60s,
00:10:25.480 | they'd be in leadership positions.
00:10:27.360 | The ethics of civility, the number one rule is do not offend.
00:10:30.760 | Don't offend people.
00:10:31.760 | Well, hell is a deeply offensive doctrine.
00:10:34.560 | And it'd be deeply offensive to many people attending churches.
00:10:37.440 | I mean, if the minister got into the pulpit and expounded Matthew 25, "The sheep and
00:10:41.920 | the goats literally applied it," said, "Some of you are sheep, some of you are goats."
00:10:45.360 | I mean, imagine the reaction in our churches.
00:10:48.440 | You can imagine how much more offensive it is to those outside of the church.
00:10:53.280 | So I think we have to recover the willingness to speak of both sides of what Jesus taught
00:10:59.880 | about that there are not only benefits from being Christian, but there are consequences
00:11:05.460 | that follow from hearing about Christ and then deliberately rejecting the gospel.
00:11:09.560 | We have to be willing to speak of that.
00:11:11.880 | The Hebrew prophets, you know, they spoke of the consequence of turning away from the
00:11:17.040 | Word of God as well as the consequence of following it.
00:11:21.260 | And that idea of the two ways that there are outcomes and consequences that follow on either
00:11:25.120 | side are important.
00:11:26.880 | At the same time, we keep the emphasis on love.
00:11:29.440 | You know, Scripture does not say, "For God so hated sin that he gave his Son," but "For
00:11:34.320 | God so loved the world."
00:11:36.120 | And so love is the actuating motive of the Father sending the Son.
00:11:41.840 | And how does God show his love?
00:11:43.880 | It says, "He so loved the world that he gave his Son."
00:11:47.200 | The Son, Jesus, is himself the living expression, embodiment of the Father's love for us.
00:11:55.920 | That was Michael J. McClymon from his office in St. Louis, Missouri, talking with us about
00:12:00.960 | his new 1,400-page magnum opus titled "The Devil's Redemption," a new history and interpretation
00:12:08.420 | of Christian universalism, now out from Baker Academic.
00:12:12.920 | So grateful for his labors.
00:12:14.400 | What an accomplishment.
00:12:15.400 | Well, Pastor John returns on Friday to field a question over whether or not he adds to
00:12:21.240 | the gospel.
00:12:22.240 | And specifically, does John Piper add joy to the gospel?
00:12:26.440 | It's a good and fair question, and it's on the table next time.
00:12:29.680 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.
00:12:30.680 | Have a wonderful Independence Day celebration, and we will see you back here on Friday.
00:12:35.120 | [END]
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00:12:36.120 | John Piper, 1 of 1
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00:12:38.120 | John Piper, The Devil's Redemption 2.
00:12:39.120 | John Piper, The Devil's Redemption 3.
00:12:40.120 | John Piper, The Devil's Redemption 4.
00:12:41.120 | John Piper, The Devil's Redemption 5.
00:12:42.120 | John Piper, The Devil's Redemption 6.
00:12:43.120 | John Piper, The Devil's Redemption 7.
00:12:44.120 | John Piper, The Devil's Redemption 8.