{"id":2005,"date":"2011-04-12T13:20:59","date_gmt":"2011-04-12T20:20:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=2005"},"modified":"2011-04-12T13:20:59","modified_gmt":"2011-04-12T20:20:59","slug":"christopher-benson-on-love-wins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2011\/04\/12\/christopher-benson-on-love-wins\/","title":{"rendered":"Christopher Benson on Love Wins"},"content":{"rendered":"

An excellent column<\/a> in First Things by Chrisopher Benson<\/a>.\u00a0 He explains how a non-universalistic reading of Karl Barth helps with the gap between the Scylla of universalism and the\u00a0Charybdis of restrictivism.\u00a0 If I have to have a view on all this, the neo-Barthian view that Benson sketches out seems the most tractable to me.\u00a0 (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.\u00a0 Somebody, please<\/em>, rescue First Things and return it to its glory days of serious theological and social discourse!!)<\/p>\n

Snippets from Benson:<\/p>\n

The recent brouhaha over Rob Bell\u2019s new book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived<\/em>, reminds me of why I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

The universalist message, by contrast, conforms to \u201cthe pattern of this world\u201d (Rom. 12:2), tickling the ears of all those who want to hear about how \u201ca 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.
\n***
\nExclusivists and universalists are presumptive demographers<\/strong>: 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\u2019s a family resemblance between exclusivists and inclusivists insofar as they both<\/em> affirm the existence of hell and believe \u201cthere 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\u201d (Acts 4:12). The feud relates to how this salvation gets worked out.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cwith God all things are possible\u201d (Mt. 19:26) and that \u201cGod shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us\u201d (Rom. 5:8). By \u201cignorant\u201d I mean the unevangelized and by \u201cimpossible\u201d I mean the unrepentant.<\/p>\n

According to inclusivists, God\u2019s rescue operation is for the entire cosmos<\/em> (John 12:32, 2 Cor. 5:18-19, 1 Tim. 2:4). This doesn\u2019t 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 \u201cthe unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God\u201d (1 Cor. 6:9-10) and specifically names \u201cthe works of the flesh\u201d that bar admittance (Gal. 5:19-21), no Christian occupies the seat of judgment that belongs to God.<\/p>\n

There may yet be opportunities, either in temporal life or postmortem life, where individuals can encounter and receive an optimal<\/em> presentation of the Gospel, \u201cnot a mixed message of joy and terror, salvation and damnation,\u201d as Karl Barth railed against in Church Dogmatics<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn itself,\u201d Barth said, \u201c[the Gospel] is light and not darkness,\u201d though he recognized it throws a shadow. Universalists err because they deny the shadow, as Bell\u2019s sunny title\u2014Love Wins<\/em>\u2014implies. If and when exclusivists err, it\u2019s because they dim the light in their stinginess about God\u2019s mercy. Each one of us responds to the light we have. Professing and practicing Christians respond to the light as if it\u2019s high noon. Spiritual seekers respond to different intensities of light, as if the sun is rising or setting.<\/p>\n

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: \u201cFor the love of Christ controls us, because we have concluded this: that one has died for all<\/em>, therefore all<\/em> have died\u201d (emphasis added). All human beings are included in the death of Christ, not just potentially but actually<\/em>. When someone comes to the Christian faith, it\u2019s not a transition from being an outsider to an insider.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re all insiders\u2014whether we realize it or not<\/strong>. Christians are simply awake to the reality of being already<\/em> accepted in Jesus Christ. Barth rejects the false alternative between \u201call are saved\u201d (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa) and \u201cnot all are saved\u201d (Augustine, Calvin). All are saved insofar as the Christ event is efficacious for humanity, but how<\/em> 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 \u201creverent agnosticism.\u201d<\/p>\n

[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\u2019s righteousness and the universalist tendency to focus singularly on God\u2019s mercy. Christ is at the center of Barth\u2019s 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\u2014without equivocation\u2014that the Cross achieves plenitude of being and eternal peace for each one of us.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t want to be \u201cdisentangled from the birdlime of concupiscence,\u201d as Augustine puts it in Confesssions<\/em>. We\u2019re all invalids by the pool of Betheseda, but some will answer the perennial question of Jesus in the negative, \u201cDo you want to be healed?\u201d (John 5:6). No living person has undergone the descent of Christ into hell, and therefore we must never<\/em> count who is there. What makes the hell-counters of Westboro Baptist Church so odious is that they feign the Cross\u2019 knowledge without undergoing the Cross\u2019 torture.<\/p>\n

****
\nWe might even say the exclusivist is a Cassandra whose fire and brimstone vision overwhelms the wideness of God\u2019s mercy, and the universalist is a Pangloss whose cheerfulness about humanity underestimates the exactitude of God\u2019s justice. If the former preaches \u201cWrath Wins,\u201d the latter declares \u201cLove Wins.\u201d Neither sermon gets it quite right, and that’s why we need to hear the inclusivist\u2019s message of \u201cSinners in the Hands of a Loving God,\u201d which preserves the dialectical tension in the Gospel: \u201cFor the wages of sin is death, but<\/em> the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord\u201d (Rom. 6:23).<\/p>\n

We cannot know the fate of every person who ever lived. For those impossible and ignorant souls, we\u2019re better off adopting a posture of \u201creverent agnosticism\u201d 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An excellent column in First Things by Chrisopher Benson.\u00a0 He explains how a non-universalistic reading of Karl Barth helps with the gap between the Scylla of universalism and the\u00a0Charybdis of restrictivism.\u00a0 If I have to have a view on all this, the neo-Barthian view that Benson sketches out seems the most tractable to me.\u00a0 (As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spirituality","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-wl","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}