Category: Spirituality

The Cape Town Commitment, a statement of Christian mission from the Lausanne Movement is, I think, an excellent contemporary expression of missional theology.  I might nuance a thing or two differently here and there, but overall this is an encouraging and robust summary of what missional theology and practice is all about.  (HT:  Scot McKnight)

An excellent column in First Things by Chrisopher Benson.  He explains how a non-universalistic reading of Karl Barth helps with the gap between the Scylla of universalism and the Charybdis of restrictivism.  If I have to have a view on all this, the neo-Barthian view that Benson sketches out seems the most tractable to me.  (As a side note, what a shame that FT editor Joe Carter cluttered up the comments with a mistaken and pinched argument about what an “evangelical” voice would say here as opposed to a “mainline” voice.  Somebody, please, rescue First Things and return it to its glory days of serious theological and social discourse!!)

Snippets from Benson:

The recent brouhaha over Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, reminds me of why I’m not at home among exclusivists or universalists. If forced to choose, I would sit at the hearth of exclusivists any day of the week, as their message does a better job of cohering with the scandal of the gospel.

The universalist message, by contrast, conforms to “the pattern of this world” (Rom. 12:2), tickling the ears of all those who want to hear about how “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross,” as theologian H. Richard Niebuhr observed 75 years ago in Kingdom of God in America.

What is the core claim of exclusivism? Catholic theologian Paul Griffiths answers: “belonging to the home religion is necessary for salvation. This . . . is to deny salvific efficacy to any alien religion. But it is not to assert salvific sufficiency to the home religion; exclusivists may or may not add to the core claim the view that belonging to the home religion is sufficient for salvation.” Those who add to the core claim are restrictivists. Those who relax their understanding of what it means to belong to the home religion are usually called inclusivists.

“Inclusivism is, in its deep logical structure, either simply a form of exclusivism or a position closely derived from it,” says Griffiths. ” Both positions answer the question of how religion provides an advantage to be had in no other way. Exclusivism . . . makes belonging to the home religion essential for salvation, but it also, in some of its variants, offers a relaxed understanding of what it might mean to belong to the home religion. Inclusivism in its most common form simply makes this relaxed understanding explicit by saying that consciously (publicly, explicitly) belonging to the home religion is not necessary for salvation.” I welcome inclusivism as a happy alternative to restrictivism and universalism.
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Exclusivists and universalists are presumptive demographers: The former claims hell is crowded and the latter that hell is empty. By contrast, inclusivists are agnostic about the population in hell, refusing to name and number the individuals who inhabit the place of torment. God alone keeps the statistics. There’s a family resemblance between exclusivists and inclusivists insofar as they both affirm the existence of hell and believe “there is salvation in no one else [Jesus Christ], for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). The feud relates to how this salvation gets worked out.

Exclusivists require a public and explicit confession of faith in Jesus Christ and a life marked by good fruit. Inclusivists acknowledge that faith and good fruit are hallmarks of Christ-followers, but are reluctant to make judgments about the destiny of ignorant or impossible souls, emphasizing that “with God all things are possible” (Mt. 19:26) and that “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). By “ignorant” I mean the unevangelized and by “impossible” I mean the unrepentant.

According to inclusivists, God’s rescue operation is for the entire cosmos (John 12:32, 2 Cor. 5:18-19, 1 Tim. 2:4). This doesn’t mean that all people are saved, as universalists claim, but that all are invited to the eternal banquet. People respond to the invitation with acceptance, rejection, or apathy. What happens to the rebels, fence sitters, and oblivious? While the Bible informs us that “the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:9-10) and specifically names “the works of the flesh” that bar admittance (Gal. 5:19-21), no Christian occupies the seat of judgment that belongs to God.

There may yet be opportunities, either in temporal life or postmortem life, where individuals can encounter and receive an optimal presentation of the Gospel, “not a mixed message of joy and terror, salvation and damnation,” as Karl Barth railed against in Church Dogmatics.

“In itself,” Barth said, “[the Gospel] is light and not darkness,” though he recognized it throws a shadow. Universalists err because they deny the shadow, as Bell’s sunny title—Love Wins—implies. If and when exclusivists err, it’s because they dim the light in their stinginess about God’s mercy. Each one of us responds to the light we have. Professing and practicing Christians respond to the light as if it’s high noon. Spiritual seekers respond to different intensities of light, as if the sun is rising or setting.

The inclusivist option has been embraced by John Wesley, C. S. Lewis, and Billy Graham. Hints of it can be found among some of the early church fathers and Reformers. I sense an inclusivist attitude in Athanasius and Karl Barth, who offer the contemporary church an ancient-future voice. For them, the key verse in understanding election is 2 Corinthians 5:14: “For the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all, therefore all have died” (emphasis added). All human beings are included in the death of Christ, not just potentially but actually. When someone comes to the Christian faith, it’s not a transition from being an outsider to an insider.

We’re all insiders—whether we realize it or not. Christians are simply awake to the reality of being already accepted in Jesus Christ. Barth rejects the false alternative between “all are saved” (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa) and “not all are saved” (Augustine, Calvin). All are saved insofar as the Christ event is efficacious for humanity, but how that gets worked out among individuals is entrusted to the perfect mercy and justice of God. Barth leaves the question about human destiny open in hope, a position that George Hunsinger calls “reverent agnosticism.”

[Barth] defines the existence of hell as a self-chosen place of separation from God. He also navigates a middle way between the exclusivist tendency to focus singularly on God’s righteousness and the universalist tendency to focus singularly on God’s mercy. Christ is at the center of Barth’s attention, descending into hell when we deserve to be there. His descent doesn’t empty hell of its occupants, all of whom lock the door from the inside, but it does show—without equivocation—that the Cross achieves plenitude of being and eternal peace for each one of us.

Tragically and unfathomably, individuals will elect against their own election in Christ, choosing poverty of being and eternal torment instead. Even though God has put us to rights, some don’t want to be “disentangled from the birdlime of concupiscence,” as Augustine puts it in Confesssions. We’re all invalids by the pool of Betheseda, but some will answer the perennial question of Jesus in the negative, “Do you want to be healed?” (John 5:6). No living person has undergone the descent of Christ into hell, and therefore we must never count who is there. What makes the hell-counters of Westboro Baptist Church so odious is that they feign the Cross’ knowledge without undergoing the Cross’ torture.

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We might even say the exclusivist is a Cassandra whose fire and brimstone vision overwhelms the wideness of God’s mercy, and the universalist is a Pangloss whose cheerfulness about humanity underestimates the exactitude of God’s justice. If the former preaches “Wrath Wins,” the latter declares “Love Wins.” Neither sermon gets it quite right, and that’s why we need to hear the inclusivist’s message of “Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God,” which preserves the dialectical tension in the Gospel: “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23).

We cannot know the fate of every person who ever lived. For those impossible and ignorant souls, we’re better off adopting a posture of “reverent agnosticism” about their outcome rather than assign them to a circle of hell; otherwise we shall incur condemnation for usurping the seat of judgment from its rightful occupant.

The best and most thorough review of Love Wins that I’ve read is from Steven Holmes at St. Andrews.  Here are the mulitple and ever-growing parts of Holmes’ review:  Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9.  Holmes is an evangelical and a Calvinist.

If you are like me — you find the questions Bell raises legitimate and troubling, but you are concerned that the conversation requires much more nuance and weight theologically (and you cannot consider yourself a universalist) — read Holmes’ blogs.  Even if you are not a staunch Calvinist like Holmes (I’m not), you’ll find them refreshing.

Holmes is quite critical of various aspects of Bell’s arguments.  But for me some of the most important of Holmes’ observations are in Parts 2 and 5 of his review.  In Part 2, Holmes recites this quote from Bell:  

“A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better … This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’s message (p. viii)”

Holmes analyzes the quote as follows:

This is a full-frontal attack on historic orthodoxy, isn’t it? Bell must be opposed, denounced, corrected, and bid farewell, because he has ceased to believe the gospel found in Scripture and taught by the church down the ages, and this paragraph is sufficient proof of that, surely? This proves that Bell is a heretic, right?

Wrong.

This is going to be a long discussion, because some historical detail is necessary. So let me state a conclusion as briefly and bluntly as I can: in saying this, Bell is saying nothing that has not been held by the vast majority of Christian theologians down the ages, taught explicitly by many of them, and repeatedly defended as Biblical by the most conservative scholars.

What is Bell actually saying, first? If we read the passage carefully, the core claim is about proportion: the offence is in the ‘select few’ who are saved – not the nature of heaven, nor the nature of hell, but in their relative populations. The message of God’s love demands that we hold that God saves many, or most, or all – that the gift of grace is not given parsimoniously. And this is not about the nature of hell, but about who God is – the claim of the book is that love wins.

The question of the relative populations of heaven and hell come the eschaton was asked quite frequently in the Reformed tradition. B.B. Warfield published an essay under the title ‘Are they few that be Saved?’ His argument was exegetical; his answer a resounding negative. In closing, he paused to point to others who held that the number of the saved would far outnumber the lost: R.L. Dabney; Charles Hodge; W.G.T. Shedd. I could add A.A. Hodge and Jonathan Edwards.

This is not a catalogue of woolly-minded liberals.

This was the united witness of Old Princeton, a position taken by at least two of the writers of The Fundamentals. These names are the very definition of Calvinist orthodoxy. These are the people whose respect for Scripture was such that they developed and defined the doctrine of inerrancy. These are the people with whom Bell is agreeing.

And when you burrow in to what they actually said, the point becomes more striking still. Charles Hodge calls the number of the lost ‘very inconsiderable’ on the last page of his Systematic Theology. Shedd actually suggests that the error of believing that only a few are saved is equal and opposite to the error of universalism. That’s Shedd, the Calvinist’s Calvinist, asserting that the point Bell writes to oppose is a grave heresy – albeit one that seems presently to be being vigorously defended by all manner of men (they do all seem to be men…) whose zeal, unfortunately, apparently far outweighs their knowledge.

(Warfield does point to one Reformed writer who holds that the number of the saved will be few, Johann Heidegger….)

Holmes returns to this discussion in Part 5:

Remember Johann Heidegger from a couple of posts back? He was the Reformed writer who held that the number of the saved would indeed be small. Shedd and Warfield condemn him for being far too conservative in his theology. Heidegger wrote about precisely this question, and said this:

“No one except those who sin unto death ought to or can determine anything certain before the end of life, concerning the eternal reprobation of himself or of others. Of others indeed we must have good hopes by the judgement of love, 1. Cor.13:7 (beareth, believeth, hopeth, endureth all things)…  (q. ET from Heppe, p. 188, with error silently corrected).”

Let’s do a kind of scale of theological conservatism here, shall we? Shedd and Warfield are conservative – I believe that will be generally granted. They reprove Heidegger for being far too conservative. That makes him, what? Ultra-conservative? Heidegger then rejects as far too conservative the position that we can know for certain that any other human being is damned. We’re somewhere off the scale now, in the company of those who think the Taliban are dangerously liberal. I have thought hard about anyone in the Christian tradition who held to this position, that we can know for certain that a particular person is in hell. There were, to be fair, some Landmarkian Baptists. And Dante, I suppose, although he might claim his allegory was not meant to be taken like that. Certainly, there are not many.

And yet when Bell doesn’t even say that this is wrong, but merely questions whether it is right, we are told that he has committed an error so grave that he must be publicly castigated.

I can’t quite decide whether this is simply brilliant debating work from Bell, enticing his opponents to defend a position so extreme that no one in their right mind would touch it, or whether his opponents really, genuinely, don’t realise just how far behind they have left anything resembling historic orthodoxy.

This is not mere theological hair-splitting.  This point is pastorally vital. Bell’s other example concerns an atheist teenager, killed in a car crash. ‘There’s no hope, then,’ comes the comment, reflecting this ridiculously extreme position. All of us who are Christian pastors have performed funeral services for those with no visible faith, and have been offered care and counsel to those, actively Christian or not, who have lost an apparently-unbelieving family member or friend. The first rule of such pastoral engagement has always been not to speculate about the fate of the dead person. One speaks with confidence the promises of Jesus, proclaims the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead, announces with utter conviction the defeat of death and sin and hell in the cross, and invites, implicitly or explicitly, the hearers to place their own faith and trust in these realities. The one who has died is in God’s hands, and it is not for us to judge. The gospel of Jesus is never, ever, ‘there’s no hope, then.’

This point is utterly vital, and Bell is simply right.

Mark Galli’s column in Christianity Today this afternoon is titled “The Problem With Christus Victor.”  To his credit, he acknowledges that the substitutionary atonement model can be presented in incorrect ways and that Christus Victor is also a Biblical model.  But his conclusion, it seems to me, is odd, to say the least:

Here, I’m simply suggesting that Christus Victor may not be a theory that Protestants, and evangelicals in particular, should tie their wagons to. While it brings to the fore some crucial and forgotten biblical truths, it’s clearly a secondary atonement theme in the New Testament. And at least for today’s Protestants, it has an uncanny tendency to downplay a sense of personal responsibility, which in the end, sabotages grace. In my view, more than ever in our day, we need Christus Vicarious.

Sigh.

Christus Victor is a “secondary atonment theme in the New Testament?”  I don’t read it that way at all!  From Matthew to Revelation a central theme of the New Testament, perhaps the central theme against its cultural background, is the victory of Jesus Christ over the powers of sin, death, and empire.

Now, Galli might be correct that if we collect specific proof texts that deal specifically with the cross, the preponderance talk about substitution.  And he is certainly correct that Christus Victor should not be advanced “at the expense of” substitution.  But the suggestion that any one facet of the atonement is a “minor theme” or that protestants or evangelicals should emphasize any one theme over another is not helpful. 

Worse, Galli makes no effort at theological discernment beyond this half-hearted weighing of proof texts.  How did the Fathers understand the atonement?  What themes have been important in the history of the Church universal?  Are there theologians working today who are synthesizing Christus Victor, substition, and other atonement models?  Galli doesn’t say.  (The early Fathers emphasized Christus Victory heavily; Anselm’s version of penal substition is important but comes later; see, e.g., Hans Boersma’s Violence, Hospitality and the Cross:  Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition).

Worse yet, Galli casts this as a peculiar question for “protestants” and “evangelicals” (whatever that latter term means nowadays).  Why should anyone care about these silos anymore?  Break them down and let’s understand once again that “Christus Victor” and “penal substitution” are just human terms for grasping at complementary aspects of the cosmic mystery of the cross.