Reforming Hell
God's justice is reforming all things—even hell—to the way He intended: wholeheartedly delighting in Him together, Shalom!
Robin Parry's Hope & Hell videos!
Promoting Greater Hope
7 Myths About Universalism
Hell—Practical & Ethical Implications Now
God went through hell so we can too
Everyone is a child of God
Royal Fire, Love, & Wedding
The Bible's Overall Story
Jesus' Parable of The Sheep & The Kids
Hope In The Face Of Suffering And Doubt
Review of The Forgotten Gospel Conference
Key Proponents
Rev Dr Robin Parry
Four Views on Hell: Second Edition
Heaven's Doors
Her Gates Will Never Be Shut
Review of Gooder's "Heaven"
Engaging People
Checkmate C. S. Lewis
Was Bishop Curry preaching Universalism at the royal wedding?
Amy Orr-Ewing
Death & the Life Hereafter
John Stackhouse
Cavanaugh Interview
CPX's Life & Faith
What Joy in Hell?—Phillip Jensen
Reformed drug traffickers reforming—Andrew & Myu
The Value of Teaching—Apostle Paul
For The Sake Of Truth And Unity—Chris Date
Talbott—Does God allow irreparable harm?
Does God coerce people into loving Him?
Do we need Hell as a motivation?
What does Jesus' hospitality tell us about God's character?
Why should we show hospitality?
How, and to whom, do we show hospitality?
What are the current views of Hell??
Is your life hell? WWJD?
Will God burn the world up?
Is Aylan Kurdi now with Jesus?
Should I be silent for the sake of unity?
"Ecclesia semper reformanda" – the church is always to be reformed
Common Ground for Christians?
For Those Who Don't Believe Hell Exists
Tag: Tradition
Book Reviews, Talk, Transcript	 December 10, 2019
Two more reasons people become universalists—Robin Parry
Most Christian Universalists reflect on traditional Christian beliefs, as an important reason as to why they embrace universalism. I'm talking about things like this:
God made us in His image (I know that's biblical but this is a thing in the Bible that the Church has made an important thing and the focus of attention).
God loves everyone.
God sent Christ to die for everyone.
God is sovereign and will bring about his purposes.
These kinds of basic Christian beliefs that aren't about universalism but when some folk started to think about these things and reflect on them, they found that these kinds of ideas were drawing them towards universalism. I would count that as tradition and this is partly why I think universalism is what I call the "perennial heresy."
It's not really a heresy so I use it in scare quotes. It's the "perennial heresy" because it keeps reinventing itself. It's really interesting how it just keeps popping up almost spontaneously through church history, with folk who aren't getting it from other folk, they're getting it from ordinary Christian beliefs that they were taught at church. It's like, "Ding! Doesn't this mean… if that's true, wouldn't that mean…" and suddenly they find themselves becoming Universalists. This is why you're not going to be able to squash universalism—because I think it's implicit in the very core of ordinary Christian faith.
Another aspect of tradition that is important for some folk, is discovering past Universalists who are orthodox Christians. For example, Gregory of Nyssa. This is important particularly for folk who are Orthodox Christians—with a big "O"—or Catholic Christians or Anglican Christians. But also for a lot of folk who were… I mean, I was really drawn by this when I was non-denominational charismatic-y, what not, thingamabob Christian. Realizing that some of these great spiritual giants of the past—people I respected and admired—were universalists. For example, I think Athanasius was a universalist. And that's like, "Oh, wow, so maybe it's not so heretical after all…"
By the way, if you are interested in this subject, two new volumes might intrigue you:
"A Larger Hope?, Volume 1" is sort of history of universal salvation. This is patristic universalism, this is Ilaria Ramelli who is the world authority on the subject.
A Larger Hope?, Volume 2″ goes from the Reformation to the 19th century, that's by me. They're quite good books if you like stories about people and so on.
For some people, a particular experience is really a key reason why they embraced Universal salvation. For example, George de Benneville. He's an interesting guy, he was a Huguenot refugee. He was born in London but his parents were Calvinists from France who—under persecution—escaped. He was living in the household of Queen Anne. Anyway, when he's a teenager he felt just so crushed by his own sense of sin and guilt—then he has his revelation of God's divine grace for him and love and mercy—and this is transforming. But from this experience—all on his own—he infers that this kind of applies to everyone. From the moment of that experience, he was a Universalist—so his church kicked him out.
He went over to France and he started preaching. He nearly was executed—he was at the gallows and the King stopped his execution. Later on, people thought he was dead—he was in a coma for a few days. He woke up in the coffin but he has this sort of out-of-body experience where he's taken around hell, then he's shown heaven, and then he's shown the final restoration when the people in hell come out. He becomes a preacher and goes to North America and preaches on all that. But the point is, for him scripture was really important but the thing that flipped him was this experience, this charismatic or pneumatic experience.
Another person to mention in this regard might be Hannah Whittle Smith who was a Quaker (also as she was part of the Brethren for some time because she had an evangelical conversion). She was an American, a revivalist holiness preacher—really, really influential, one of the most influential women preachers of 19th century. She was a Universalist, although this was often suppressed—in fact, it was removed from the second edition of her autobiography.
She has this experience where she's on a tram and she's just struggling with the suffering of humanity and then she looks at this guy and she sees in his face the suffering he's having and she just protests to God about his justice and desires his salvation. She has this sense that God says to her, from the verse from Isaiah, "He, Christ, will see the travail of his soul and be satisfied." She thinks, "He'll be satisfied, he will be satisfied… How can he be satisfied unless he redeems this guy? How can he be satisfied unless that for which he suffered comes to pass?" So she has this profound experience that completely reorientates her and she goes back to the Bible then and she says, this is a little quote from her, "I turned greedily from page to page of my Bible, fairly laughing aloud for joy at the blaze of light that illuminated at all. It became a new book." And that's quite common. So she's reading Scripture again but in a new way, in the light of this experience.
Above is my transcript—edited for readability—of an excerpt from the video below. For more transcripts see: Robin's Hope & Hell videos
Filed under: A Larger Hope, Experience, George de Benneville, Hannah Whittle Smith, Robin Parry, Tradition
Promoting Greater Hope, Talk, Transcript	 November 27, 2019 December 11, 2019
How do people become universalists?—Robin Parry
Let's just say a little bit about different routes that people take into universalism or, how is it that somebody might become a universalist? There are actually different ways—this is my version. I'm an Anglican and Anglicans have this thing: "The three legged stool, scripture, reason, and tradition." This is how we do theology. But I became a Christian in a Methodist Church and as we're in a Wesleyan building now, I should pay deference to that. There is a Wesleyan quadrilateral: scripture, reason, tradition, and experience." So I'm going to be an Anglodist and put these together:
So this is the way I think about scripture, reason, and tradition. So "Scripture" is obviously Scripture. What I mean by "Tradition" is—it's quite a wide-ranging thing—all the patterns of prayer and worship that we inherit by becoming part of the community of faith. It is doctrine, like the doctrine of the Trinity. It's the doctrine of Scripture too. Your belief about Scripture being inspired and authoritative, that's part of tradition, that's not Scripture, that's what tradition tells you Scripture is (and rightly so, I think). By "Experience", I am talking about your own experiences but more than that, also the way in which we might draw on empirical sciences, for example, as we reflect about God. Or the social sciences, physics, or whatever, I'm including that in experience. The little arrows are my bit of "Reason" because I don't think reason has its own domain. You don't study Scripture and then study reason. Reason is how we reflect about Scripture, how we reflect on our experience, how we reflect on doctrine, and how we go back and forth between them. We use reason as we think, "How does Scripture relate to tradition?" and "How does it relate to experience?", etc.
A healthy Christian approach to thinking about faith is going to involve all of these and it's going to be a constant moving around between the poles. Back and forth, as you reason them with Scripture and experience and tradition. Back and forth, and it never stops so, sorry, this is gonna be the rest of your life.
All those people who got into Christian universalism through history involved all of these things. But particular poles were important for different ones of them—especially important as, sort of, routes in. One of those routes in—one of those poles—that has always been very important for people becoming universalists is the Bible.
For most Christian universalists, the Bible played a key role in the journey towards belief in universal restoration. I mean, after all, these guys are Christians! (and by "guys" I'm including girls as well—this is a generic "guy") These guys are Christians and if they thought that this was unbiblical, they're not really going to be too sympathetic to it, are they?
Let me just give you an example of one guy. I love this chap Elhanan Winchester—18th century Baptist, revivalist preacher. He grew up a very strict Calvinist. This was in North America and during the Great Awakening. He's very strict—like he's a hyper-Calvinist—but a real heart for the gospel and a real anti-slavery campaigner.
One day somebody sort of gives him this book, which is a German Pietist book but it's defending universal salvation. He kind of looks through it and thinks, "Well, that's interesting, never thought about that," but he puts it aside. Then a few months later he's at a friend's house and he sees the book again. He picks it up and flicks through it and thinks, "Well, I'm not sure that's a good argument, not sure what I'd say to that." But again he puts it aside. However, it kind of gets under his skin, he just can't get these questions out of his head. So whenever he goes around to talk to his Baptist minister friends, he sort of plays devil's advocate and starts saying, "What do you think about this argument?" and all this, and he pretends to defend the view. He gets to the point where he said he was half a convert but really resisting it, to the point, that he would preach with great ferocity against this view—trying to persuade himself more than anyone else.
Anyway, it all comes to a head when he becomes the minister of the biggest Baptist Church in Philadelphia and it sort of gets out that he's been asking these questions. He thinks, "I need to know what I think about this," so he basically locked himself away with the Bible and just reads the Bible. "I just want to know what the Bible says, and whatever it says, I'm going to go with that." After a few days he comes out and says, "Right, now I know, Scripture says this. From now on I'm committing myself to this, even if all my friends reject me, and they probably will." And a bunch of them did, sure enough, but for him the key thing is Scripture. It has to be scriptural. We might think that some of his readings of Scripture are quirky and all that but the point is, this is the thing that drives him, this is what motivates him. That's the case for a lot of these guys.
Charles Chauncey, another guy who was the minister of the first Congregationalist Church in Boston—a very important church. He became a universalist just through studying Scripture, I mean nobody—no universalist—influenced him, he's just studying texts. 1 Corinthians 15 is the one that gets him into it. He's a very careful exegete and scholar. He kind of gets into this and then starts reading other bits and the whole thing comes together for him that way. So for some of these guys, Scripture is really key.
Above is my transcript—edited for readability—of an excerpt from the video below. The next post will look at "Tradition" and "Experience". For more transcripts see: Robin's Hope & Hell videos
Filed under: Elhanan Winchester, Experience, Gospel Conversations, Reason, Robin Parry, Scripture, The Bible, Tradition
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