universalism and all that

or, dave comes out of the closet...

to put it bluntly, i just can't believe that sending sinners to eternal torment in hell amounts to justice, no matter what the crime. it defies every principle of justice and punishment fitting the crime that we hold to as humans, and, as george macdonald says, if we don't think something is fair or right, it's tantamount to blasphemy to attribute it to god. god's sense of fairness must be at least as strong as ours, or else he's not the holy and just god we believe he is. on the other side of the coin, we also need to beware of attributing to god our human sense of revenge and wanting to get even. god's righteousness would mean nothing to us without his infinite capacity to forgive.

compounding the issue is the fact that we sin in ignorance: no child knows or understands before they start sinning that they will be forever damned for their actions. still further, even if we did understand the consequences, it wouldn't make a difference because of the innate sinful nature we inherit as descendents of adam. so we are in a catch-22 situation: we cannot help sinning but we are forever damned for it. how is that just?

this of course is an argument that has been made many times. i do not deny that we have been gifted (or burdened?) with free will, so we must take responsibility for our actions, but at the same time i do not believe god looks at us with a demanding, legalistic attitude, just waiting for us to slip up so he can get the rod out. i do not do this with my daughter, who i love more than my life, but instead expect her to be independent and (increasingly) rebellious, wanting to go her own way and do what she wants. in the same way, i believe god understands our rebellious natures and treats us with immeasurable forbearance, going so far as to give his son to provide a way out of our bondage to sin and into a new life of true freedom.

george macdonald put forward another argument against the eternal punishment doctrine which i find, if anything, even more compelling. if even one soul is separated from god for eternity, with no possible means of return, it means that satan has won a victory against god, and that is unthinkable. god must have the final, complete victory, but it would not be, could not be, an absolute victory if satan has succeeded in capturing any souls forever. when he died, jesus descended to hell and opened the gates, rendering it no longer an inescapable prison. if anyone chooses, they may simply walk out, and the eternal father is forever on the lookout to welcome each one with great celebration. since jesus' death, it is only our will that keeps us from god, but the way back will never be closed off. never ever.

obviously the implications of a universalist stance are many, going right to the heart of how we are to live as believers in this world. most importantly, i think, it puts a big question over many missionary and proselytising efforts. to my mind, that's not such a bad thing, because these kinds of endeavours have often had disturbing overtones of manipulation and coercion, if not downright convert-buying. at the more mundane level, i've always been at least a little uncomfortable with exhortations to befriend people in the hope of 'winning them to christ', because it smacks of false pretenses. don't we befriend people because they are fellow human beings who we can share our lives with and whose outlook and experience can teach and inform our own lives?

so why tell anyone about the good news of jesus, and why bother believing it and living it ourselves if it doesn't really make a difference for whether or not we go to heaven? after all, it's a lot easier and a lot more fun to ignore god and do our own thing...

well, no doubt it'd be easier, but since when was that the point? since adam and eve ate the forbidden fruit it's always been easier to follow our own desires, but that doesn't mean it's the better way to live. on the contrary, the bible makes it abundantly clear that the best way to live is according to god's law. as michael casey says in his book toward god:

"The ultimate truth of human life is that all our searching leads to God. In Saint Augustine's timeless words, 'You have made us for yourself [O God] and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.' This is something we know about every human being. He or she is made for God; there will always be an incompleteness until a person arrives at God.

...

"We were created with an orientation toward God, and so actions that direct us toward God accord with the imperatives of our nature. When we try to live moral lives after the example of Christ, and open our minds and hearts to prayer, we are not simply doing something 'religious'; we are fulfilling the most fundamental requirement of our humanity. By God's gift we can turn away from the intangible and immediate, transcend the attractions of sense and image, and stretch forth into the infinite sea of eternity. We can add a new dimension to our human experience." (p.3)

just before he slipped away, jesus gave his disciples 'the great commission':

"All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age." (matthew 28: 18-20, niv)

jesus knew what people need, how their lives can be lived to the full, and he taught this to his disciples, then told them to go tell it to the ends of the earth. there is nothing here about telling people that if they don't believe they'll go to hell for eternity, and neither was such a message part of the "everything I have commanded you" he told the disciples to pass on. it's true, especially towards the end of his ministry, jesus said a lot about the consequences of not following his teachings, but those words were all directed at the believers. in the parable of the sheep and goats, it is to the ones who claim to know jesus, who call out, "lord, lord," that he says, "depart from me, i never knew you." the others, who put their faith into practice, didn't even realise they were doing it for jesus, and he welcomes them into his rest.

which brings me to the second reason we should be following jesus and encouraging others to do the same: what we do has consequences, both here and after we die. i don't subscribe to the view that we'll all just stroll into heaven the minute we leave this mortal coil. such a view makes a mockery of god, and isn't in any way consistent with the bible's teaching. god is holy, and demands holiness from us. but while purity is a state (that disappears quickly!), holiness is a life. we cannot be declared holy, we can only learn to be holy through repentance. even jesus needed to be proved holy by his life, as it says in hebrews 5:8-9:

"Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him." (niv)

this doesn't mean jesus wasn't perfect through his life, but his perfection, his holiness, wasn't complete until he'd finished his work. we tend, i think, not to apply this to ourselves, but it doesn't make sense to me how i can be, for example, hateful to my neighbor one minute and holy the next, just because i died in between. being holy means learning how to love my neighbor, and i won't be holy until i've done that. and we will never enter the holy city of god, our final destination where all our desires will be completely fulfilled, until we are holy, until all unholiness has been purged from our lives, which can only be achieved by a long process of repentance, turning from our pride and selfishness and choosing to love.

george macdonald frequently made the point that jesus saves us from our sin, but not the consequences of our sin. i don't fully understand what he meant by this, but one of the obvious examples is our inevitable human death. the promise to adam and eve was that if they ate of the tree they would die, and as children of adam we inherit that promise, and hence we will all die as a consequence of our sin. but that's not the end of the story, as romans 6:23 says:

"For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." (niv)

this verse has most popularly been used to support the eternal punishment doctrine, but it doesn't seem inherent to me that the second part cancels out the first. instead, i think it makes sense to see it as saying that, yes, we die, but then god gives us eternal life as a gift, completely gratuitous and unearned. and this gift, this act of grace on god's part, is meaningless unless it is also universal, given freely and in equal measure to all.

finally (and maybe ironically having spent so much time on the subject), i don't actually get the impression from reading the bible that what happens to us after we die is an issue god wants us to be concerned about to a great extent. i believe that saving is god's work, and our task is to live as true followers of christ. the commandment of jesus was for us to love each other as he taught and modelled, and thus the world will know we are his disciples. to me this means that the primary mode of evangelism is believers living in community, demonstrating to the world the kingdom life which is love and service to each other. of course, this doesn't mean we ignore non-believers and stay in our holy huddles, but that we go and live the life of following jesus out in the open, in the view of all, and especially where there is no witness of this kind. and by being salt and light in the dark places, we will be used by god to draw all people to himself.

the good war?

there's a great piece in today's smh by richard drayton, senior lecturer in history at Cambridge University, called War's moral compass is flawed and points in all directions (originally published in the guardian as An ethical blank cheque).

drayton mentions taken by force, a book by robert lilly which is a study of the rapes committed by american soldiers in europe between 1942 and 1945. lilly suggests a minimum of 10,000 rapes (which is probably a conservative estimate). elsewhere in the essay, drayton talks of crimes committed by allied soldiers in the pacific against japanese captives, quoting edgar james, an 'embedded' pacific war correspondent:

"We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments."

the point of bringing these things up is primarily because they are never mentioned or talked about, and thus largely unknown by the general population. we very readily remember the atrocities committed by the 'enemy' but sweep our own shameful actions under the carpet. once again marx's adage that history is written by the victors is proved correct. it's not just an issue of good guys and bad guys, needing to believe your side is right in order to sustain the will to win the war. as drayton says, the effect is much farther reaching:

"All this seems innocent fun, but patriotic myths have sharp edges. The 'good war' against Hitler has underwritten 60 years of warmaking. It has become an ethical blank cheque for British and US power. We claim the right to bomb, to maim, to imprison without trial on the basis of direct and implicit appeals to the war against fascism.

When we fall out with such tyrant friends as Noriega, Milosevic or Saddam we rebrand them as 'Hitler'. In the 'good war' against them, all bad things become forgettable 'collateral damage'. The devastation of civilian targets in Serbia or Iraq, torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the war crime of collective punishment in Falluja, fade to oblivion as the 'price of democracy'."

i find this all very interesting, and i'm not just trying to wack the purpetrators and supporters of the iraq war over the head once again (no matter how much i enjoy it :^). at the least i think we need to keep being reminded that, especially with issues of war, there is no black and white, right and wrong. not for the first time, bruce cockburn puts it perfectly:

God, damn the hands of glory
That hold the bloody firebrand high
Close the book and end the story
Of how so many men have died
Let the world retain in memory
That mighty tongues tell mighty lies
And if mankind must have an enemy
Let it be his warlike pride
Let it be his warlike pride

(from It's Going Down Slow, Bruce Cockburn, 1971)

more committed?

thanks to backyard missionary andrew hamilton for the link to this excellent article, It's No Longer About Commitment.

i especially agree that real, 'deep', discipleship must start with the those in leadership (not just pastors, but including elders, deacons and those who may not hold any 'office' but who are effectively leaders because of their maturity in the faith). As the author, stephen hinks, says:

"The starting place for sacrifice to re-enter our parlance and practice is with leadership. Leaders need to lead the way with deep personal change. Leaders need to model what sacrifice is, how choices are made, how costs are weighed and how fruits are enjoyed. When the language of sacrifice is recaptured by individual Christians we can put depth into our disciple-making."

bunch of scheming swindlers

i know this is lazy blogging, but i came across this excellent quote by soren kierkegaard at emergingsideways (picked up originally from mike at waving or drowing?) and wanted to pass it on:

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

framing and families

thanks to rowen at sailing close to the wind for the link to don't think of an elephant from a few weeks back. the link contains a review of, and extract from, george lakoff's book Don’t Think of an Elephant – Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (scribe publications, melbourne, 2005).

the idea of 'framing' is thought-provoking and provides a plausible explanation for the hold the bush and howard (aus) governments seem to have over the minds of their electorates at the conceptual level. what piqued my interest most, though, was the depiction of the conservative/progressive divide in terms of two different models of the family: "a strict father family and a nurturant parent family." the description of the 'strict father' model is made with reference to conservative christian author dr. james dobson, who's book dare to discipline has been the bible of child-rearing for conservative/evangelical christians for 30 years. lakoff summarises the set of assumptions behind this paradigm as follows:

The world is a dangerous place, and it always will be, because there is evil out there in the world. The world is also difficult because it is competitive. There will always be winners and losers. There is an absolute right and an absolute wrong. Children are born bad, in the sense that they just want to do what feels good, not what is right. Therefore, they have to be made good.

What is needed in this kind of a world is a strong, strict father who can:

• Protect the family in the dangerous world,

• Support the family in the difficult world, and

• Teach his children right from wrong.

What is required of the child is obedience, because the strict father is a moral authority who knows right from wrong. It is further assumed that the only way to teach kids obedience—that is, right from wrong— is through punishment, painful punishment, when they do wrong. This includes hitting them, and some authors on conservative child rearing recommend sticks, belts, and wooden paddles on the bare bottom. Some authors suggest this start at birth, but Dobson is more liberal. “There is no excuse for spanking babies younger than fifteen or eighteen months of age” (Dobson, The New Dare to Discipline, 65).

The rationale behind physical punishment is this: When children do something wrong, if they are physically disciplined they learn not to do it again. That means that they will develop internal discipline to keep themselves from doing wrong, so that in the future they will be obedient and act morally. Without such punishment, the world will go to hell. There will be no morality.

from what i know, this is a fairly accurate summary of the conservative attitude to child-rearing (as well as to social policy, as lakoff goes on to explain). it has particular personal resonance for me because it is more or less the model with which i was raised (as i expect most children of conservative christians have been from the 1950s to this day). based on my experience, and extensive subsequent reflection, i think that the assumptions and conclusions of this model are fundamentally flawed, and often have very harmful consequences. while it may produce a semblance of obedience and discipline, fear of punishment never by itself engenders true maturity. on the contrary, what it teaches is passive-aggressive conformity while the authority figure is present, and undisciplined free-for-all when it is believed there is little chance of 'being found out'. this is a far cry from the goal of producing adults who make the right choice because they believe it to be the best action, not because they are afraid of the consequences of doing the 'wrong' thing.

this whole subject is especially pertinent for me now that i have a child of my own. as with all children, she needs to learn that she can't do whatever she wants whenever she wants, but she often doesn't understand the boundaries we set for her or why we tell her not to do something, so she screams and resists or defiantly does what we've told her not to. i find it quite hard sometimes to resist dishing out some sort of physical punishment such as a slap, and occasionally i cross the boundary and immediately regret it. on the one hand i'm aware that my reaction is often more to do with what's going on for me than for her (for instance, i'm frustrated that she doesn't obey me, or she has done something that will require me to clean up - she's not of an age to clean up after herself yet). my greatest fear, though, is that she grows up in fear of me. i desperately want her to feel protected by my strength, for it to be a refuge for her, not a threat - no matter what she does.

if freya knows that our love for her is unconditional, that to the best of our knowledge and abilities we have her interest and well-being at heart, then i believe she'll be less likely to question and resist the things we ask her to do, even if she doesn't understand the reason behind it. at the same time, feeling secure in our love will allow her to explore and expand her boundaries, knowing that if she fails or does something wrong, we'll be there for her. then, as she grows up, she'll learn to seek and trust our advice and guidance, eventually becoming an adult who can trust herself to make good decisions based on a good understanding of the consequences.

at least that's the ideal. problem is, we're far from perfect parents and who knows what life will throw at us. boundaries and unconditional love is the principle, but i know we're still going to stuff things up big time. thank god for the resilience he's built into us as human beings. and most of all for his amazing grace to cover over our failures and make all things work for good.

pick of the pics

if you haven't had a look at the world press photo site, i highly recommend it. the winners gallery for 2005 gives a great retrospective of the events of 2004, both high profile and low, ordinary and historic. excuse the pun, but i think this collection of photos (if it is preserved in any way, which i assume it will be) will be a fascinating snapshot for future generations of the world as it was circa 2004, providing as it does the occasionally intentional but often incidental glimpses of technology, fashion, living conditions, sports, and just about everything else that was part of life as we knew it in the last year.

i especially like these from the nature category:

the weirdest photo must be the headless gymnast:

my favourite, though, is the swimmer who left his legs behind:

also superb (as you'd expect) is the gallery of winners of the last 50 years. for the most part it is a chronicle of tragedy and suffering, but in many ways that is the exactly the history of the last 50 years. after how many millenia of living together in this world, the cruelty and indifference of human beings to others is absolutely shocking, and it continues seemingly unabated.

viewing these pictures, it is easy to believe the assertions of rene girard, that all human societies are structured around the making of victims, killing and excluding in order to define and assert the identity of the group. in knowing jesus, james alison brilliantly turns this idea to the dealings of god with humankind as told in the bible, reframing the gospel as the story of jesus, the gratuitously given, forgiving victim, who willingly suffered the ultimate exclusion and became the ultimate sacrifice, in order to provide the way and means for us to have true life in ultimate freedom. this freedom is only found in escaping the tyranny of reactionary and reciprocating violence, moving from the endless cycle of victimhood and victimising to relationships of free and joyful giving of oneself to others, and, in so doing, joining the new society of forgiving victims which is the kingdom of god founded in jesus.

well, i didn't really intend to get all heavy, but these things are on my mind, and i am increasingly sickened by the violence and cruelty in the world and the wilful, repugnant indifference of the privileged (myself included) to the suffering of others. may we grow each day closer to the life god requires of us, in the words of the prophet, "to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God" (micah 6:8, NIV).

victim mentality

i'm just over a quarter of the way through james alison's knowing jesus, but from the first pages i knew it was going to be a significant experience, similar to my first encounters with henri nouwen and george macdonald. alison has an amazing way of presenting multifaceted truth in wonderfully simple language, and to make it feel revolutionary yet entirely traditional at the same time. this is the best kind of theological writing, drawing and stimulating and inspiring.

the foreward to the book is by archbishop of canterbury rowan williams, and is excellent in its own right. i'd like to quote it at length, because it does a great job of introducing and setting the tone for the book:

[We] do not meet Jesus simply as another human individual; but neither is he just the subject of inspiring stories. We meet Jesus as the resurrected one - the one who, after those closest to him have betrayed him and left him to die alone, returns as the source of grace and hope to those treacherous and fearful friends. What this means is that Jesus 'appears' now as the agency of a completely gratuitous love, right outside the calculations, rewards and punishments of human relationships, outside the complicated negotiations for living space that dominate the 'ordinary' human world, with its underlying assumption that we all live at each other's expense. And this makes clear to us as never before just how deep that assumption goes, and forces us to look afresh at those at whose expense we live - our victims. The resurrection of Jesus makes it impossible to take for granted that the world is nothing but a system of oppressors and victims, [an] endless cycle of reactive violence. We are free to understand ourselves and each other in a new way, as living in mutual gift not mutual threat. We can collaborate in the relations that the resurrection sets in motion, relations of forgiveness, equality and care. And if we recognise our habitual bondage to reactive relations, passing on or returning the wounds we have received, and feel in our lives together the solid reality of relationships that transcend this, then we 'know Jesus'.

...

James Alison is - among other things - restating what some of his Dominican ancestors meant by 'knowledge through participation', and indeed what the whole early and medieval Christian tradition understood as becoming 'divine' in communion with Christ - growing into freedom, beyond the prison of self-absorbed, self-referential feelings, beyond the reactive and repetitive world sustained by sin. But this recovery of older wisdom is given a profoundly contemporary slant in its concern with violence and victimage. As a culture, we have become more alert to the depth and breadth of historical and personal violence, to just how many victims our 'normative' culture creates. But if we are to believe in the hope of something more than just reparation or settling scores, we need the concrete presence of relations that transcend reaction, jostling for space, rivalry; we need Christ and the Church.

...

[True] theology, truthful reflection on what God is and does, can't be done without conversion to a new perspective on yourself and the world. God is not to be known unless we grasp the depth of our freedom and our unfreedom, unless we give up fictions about our purity or our innocence and become committed to searching out those we exclude and suppress, creating with them the promised community of mutual gift. This is the community that depends on the resurrection of Jesus; to belong wholeheartedly to it is to know Jesus - and the God whom Jesus called 'Father'.

Rowan Williams, Foreward to Knowing Jesus, pp vii - ix

there is so much here, and it certainly doesn't need me to add anything to it. the whole topic of "our freedom and our unfreedom" is in itself a huge one. the real gem in this for me, though, is that in bringing to light the victim mentality which is so strong in us. especially in our closest relationships, but to some extent with everyone we come in contact with, we are so quick to "[pass] on or [return] the wounds we have received". it is a natural and automatic response, which we feel is completely justified - after all, isn't it proper and just to punish the wrongdoer? but it is through the resurrection of jesus that we can gain access to "the solid reality of relationships that transcend this," and we can "collaborate in ... relations of forgiveness, equality and care." the resurrection of jesus breaks "endless cycle of reactive violence," and sets us free to live together in "mutual gift not mutual threat."

what a world that will be!

glimpsing the mystery

this quote jumped out at me as i was reading on the train on the way home from work on friday evening:

The paradox of faith and of nature is this: the knowledge we gain will bring with it an overwhelming amount of mystery. One escalates in proportion to the other.

Cindy Crosby, The Reconstruction of a Prairie and a Faith, Mars Hill Review Issue 23, pg 130.

i think it's brilliant. the more we know about the world and in our faith, the more we become aware of how much we don't know. but it's not just about us, an awareness of our own ignorance. if we turn our eyes outside ourselves we catch a glimpse of the staggering depth of mystery out there, that we are part of something huge which for now is beyond our ability to see and understand. it's at once awesome and incredibly exciting.