A friend and brother in Messiah who finds UR an attractive doctrine sent me the list below of 6 basic points of UR:
1. Universal reconciliation (UR) is the only doctrine that ultimately answers the question "why is there evil and suffering in the world?". Either sin and rebellion are an unwarranted and unplanned for reality or they are here by God's all-wise and all-loving design. If a good tree can only bring forth good fruit, then it is certain that a good Creator will design nothing the end of which is not pure happiness and usefulness for His entire creation. His unimpeachable Character demands such faithful discharge of His infinite love, wisdom and power over His entire universe.
2. UR is the only doctrine that glorifies God as the ultimate "all in all" (I Cor. 15:28). (How can He be everything to just some of His creation if most of His world is ultimately lost to Him?) Scripture affirms that all creation will be finally subjected to God with the identical subjection of the Son to God (that is, with all glad and obedient worship and thanks). Indeed, so complete will this subjection of all be that the apostle found it necessary in his declaration to exempt God the Father Himself from the general rule!
3. UR is the only doctrine that allows the redemption of Christ to "super-abound" over the rebellion of Adam (e.g. Rom. 5:12f). Scripture declares the principle on which God is operating to the redemption of all is the same principle by which the universal fall of man came about. If UR is not true then Adam will forever be greater than Christ, seeing it is only the few who are saved, and may that never be! Which is to say, the scope of redemption is co-extensive with the fall.
4. UR is the only doctrine that has death being swallowed up by life. (If some are exterminated forever in death then death is still king over most people.)
5. The "difficult" texts that (seem to) teach the permanent, irredeemable extinction of the wicked do not bear up under a better paradigm of UR. That paradigm is that there is a special and limited salvation for believers in Christ (and that refers to "eternal life" which is the life of the age to come) and a more general and ultimate salvation pledged by God in the ages beyond. God is the Saviour of "the body" of Christ, but He is also the Saviour of the world (Eph. 5:23; John 4:42; I John 4:14; I Tim. 4:10, etc.) The Bible does teach the certain judgment and destruction of the wicked, but nowhere can this be shown to mean annihilation. Ultimately, every single knee and every single tongue will confess the Lordship of Christ to the glory of God.
6. UR can be demonstrated to have been the general and earliest of the Church's position before it taught either annihilation-ism (Conditional Immortality) or eternal torment.
Following is my reply:
Before addressing these points in some detail I would like to suggest where I see the foundational error is being made.
The Jews learned through many different times and challenges that the God of Abraham was the One True God. They learned that He was the Creator, Sustainer and Saviour and that therefore any understanding of the nature of the world and man, ultimately came back to seeking to know the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It is from this foundation that their understanding has developed and this foundational truth continues in large measure to underscore most Jewish Biblical scholarship.
Gentiles, on the other hand, have not had this history of interaction with the God of Abraham to drum into them His Oneness and His core attributes such as the priority of justice and mercy.
Instead, it seems to me that Gentiles tend to put forward the argument that ‘God is love’, and then they deduct from their own understanding of what love is, what God is and what His world should be and ultimately will be.
With this approach, a great many doctrines have been developed which may be correct, but which are suspect, because they are really just suppositions and conjecture, not properly grounded in what the God of Abraham has revealed to the world through both His creation and critically, through the Hebrew Scriptures and to a lesser degree the NT (being in its current state of much more questionable reliability, but mainly because the NT itself, apart from introducing the historical arrival of the Messiah, is largely midrashic, that is, it is primarily interpretation of, and commentary on the Tanakh).
This difference of starting point is really the classic core difference between Hellenism and the Hebraic mindset.
Universalism is quite clearly a view that has developed from a Hellenistic viewpoint; from the perspective of starting with ‘God is love’ therefore …
While this starting point doesn’t necessarily invalidate Universalism or UR, it does seem that to be valid and ultimate truth, UR surely it needs to bear up under an alternative Hebraic approach as well. That is, if we start with the God of Abraham and His interactions with the world as described foundationally in the Tanakh, would we arrive at the same doctrine?
The simple and emphatic answer is no, because if it were yes, the world of the Hebrew and Judaism would have been promoting it as a foundational doctrine for the last 3,500 plus years. That is, they would have promoted this doctrine long before any Gentile influence on their understanding of God; an understanding that sees the One True God, the God of Israel as a God of justice and mercy, above all else.
As I don’t expect this overview to be totally convincing to those who have invested much effort and passion into the doctrine of Universal Reconciliation, I have already written at some length on this topic (see Universalism: Either the best news ever or a sad and dangerous delusion?).
Below are some specific comments on each of the six points above:
(Basic Points of UR are in RED)
1. Universal reconciliation (UR) is the only doctrine that ultimately answers the question "why is there evil and suffering in the world?". Either sin and rebellion are an unwarranted and unplanned for reality or they are here by God's all-wise and all-loving design. If a good tree can only bring forth good fruit, then it is certain that a good Creator will design nothing the end of which is not pure happiness and usefulness for His entire creation. His unimpeachable Character demands such faithful discharge of His infinite love, wisdom and power over His entire universe.
My Response:
I don’t think any doctrine totally answers the challenging question of evil. Certainly, there have been many attempts with Will Dembski’s book ‘The End of Christianity’ perhaps one of the cleverest and unusual. I think his ‘solution’ is certainly a more satisfactory one than UR, but I suspect neither is necessary.
Your premise “that a good Creator would design nothing, the end of which is not … good” (paraphrasing), may well be true, but it is not necessarily so. We simply do not have either the depth of knowledge or intellectual capacity to totally comprehend how God works good through and from the evil that is clearly present in the world. What we do have though is the narratives of the Tanakh that indicate how God has dealt with His world in the past, from the way he dealt with Adam; with those in Noah’s day, and with Abraham, etc.
No doctrine though which addresses only the end of the ages can fully satisfy the challenge of current suffering or evil though.
Your statement that God’s character demands UR is really a circular argument. Worse, given that Scripture so clearly teaches that God’s character is a perfect combination of justice and mercy, any doctrine that avoids the ‘demands’ of justice is one, I would argue, which clearly presents a distorted view of mercy and love. This distorted view seems to actually reject God’s justice. Justice demand consequences to a first cause.
If UR was the ultimate purpose of God, then reward and punishment are redundant and the evidence throughout the Scriptures of God’s reward and punishment would instead suggest that God is schizophrenic.
2. UR is the only doctrine that glorifies God as the ultimate "all in all" (I Cor. 15:28). (How can He be everything to just some of His creation if most of His world is ultimately lost to Him?) Scripture affirms that all creation will be finally subjected to God with the identical subjection of the Son to God (that is, with all glad and obedient worship and thanks). Indeed, so complete will this subjection of all be that the apostle found it necessary in his declaration to exempt God the Father Himself from the general rule!
My Response:
I totally disagree that ‘UR is the only doctrine that glorifies God as the ultimate "all in all" (I Cor. 15:28)’.
To suggest that normal understandings of this scripture are totally deficient is in itself, it seems to me somewhat arrogant, but worse, it shows a lack of clarity and appreciation of context.
Firstly, the Tanakh is replete with the truth that ‘death’ (and by death meaning the death of human beings), will one day be ‘abolished’.
In fact, when Isaiah speaks of this in chapter 25:5,8-9 for example, he clearly refers to a select company, the Jewish people. Isaiah also makes it abundantly clear here that the enemies of the Jewish people are not part of this salvation.
“As the heat in a dry place will you bring down the noise of strangers; as the heat by the shade of a cloud, the song of the dreaded ones will be brought low...
He has swallowed up death forever! The Lord Yahweh will wipe away tears from off all faces. He will take the reproach of his people away from off all the earth, for Yahweh has spoken it. It shall be said in that day, “Behold, this is our God! We have waited for him, and he will save us! This is Yahweh! We have waited for him. We will be glad and rejoice in his salvation!”
What about when the Apostle Paul refers to the same future? Note again, that he too is referring to the removal of death for man, not for plants or animals, etc. The death that came with Adam, was the death of man and the resurrection that came with Yeshua was the resurrection of man. We have no evidence either explicitly or historically that animals and plants and bacteria, etc are resurrected.
1 Cor 15:20-21 “But now Christ has been raised from the dead. He became the first fruits of those who are asleep. For since death came by man, the resurrection of the dead also came by man.”
Notice that ‘those who are asleep’ in the context here are only the ‘saved’, as it is only the ‘saved’ that are resurrected to life. In the context of 1 Cor 15:28 then, the ‘all things’ and ‘all in all’ clearly refers to the domain of people and to the domain and circumstances of the ‘saints’. To infer that it refers to any more is complete conjecture.
To expand ‘all things’ to include all life and even all matter that has ever existed in the past, is so totally ‘out of bounds’ of Hebraic thought, which always deals with ‘living truth’ and all relationships and activities that flow from the 2 Tables (the 10 Words – our relationship with God and with our neighbours).
Also scientifically we would have a insurmountable problem if all life and all matter were to attempt resurrection as the matter that makes each of us today is the same matter that existed as light at the beginning of the creation of the universe (matter/energy can not be created or destroyed – we are created from the light that was present in the first moments of creation).
3. UR is the only doctrine that allows the redemption of Christ to "super-abound" over the rebellion of Adam (e.g. Rom. 5:12f). Scripture declares the principle on which God is operating to the redemption of all is the same principle by which the universal fall of man came about. If UR is not true then Adam will forever be greater than Christ, seeing it is only the few who are saved, and may that never be! Which is to say, the scope of redemption is co-extensive with the fall.
My Response:
Again an illogical argument. Adam is not greater than the Messiah today, and therefore their relationship at the end of the ages is already decreed and established. After all Paul goes on to say in Romans 5 that you quote from that “But the free gift is not like the trespass.” That is, the two can not be fairly equated.
The argument that because Adam caused all to ultimately die and salvation is only for a limited number implies that Adam is greater than any future saviour, is totally erroneous. The whole theme of Scripture is that God ‘hides’ himself to a degree and calls for us to seek Him. See Jeremiah 29:13 “And you shall seek me, and find me, when you shall search for me with all your heart.” for example. For more on this understanding see my article at http://luke443.blogspot.com/2011/04/king-who-hides.html
That is, it has always been God’s plan that in giving us the freedom to choose him, which includes the need to offer a very attractive alternative, He has always known that some, and in fact most, will reject Him. The answer to this reality, that at the same time shows his amazing mercy, is the doctrine of ‘annihilation’.
Consider the great flood. When God choose to save only eight people, this was a demonstration of his judgment. This was real death. To suggest that these people didn’t really face judgment but have simply been put in ‘cold storage’ to serve as an example to frighten us, would be to make God a deceiver and two-timer.
The great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said that “Death should not be distorted by a craving for immortality; rather it ought to be one’s act of reciprocity to God for the Gift of life. For the pious person it is a privilege to die”.
How does it seem God rewards such a person? By resurrecting him to life eternal. How does a merciful God reward one who has not recognized the value of the gift God has given them? By removing His breath and extinguishing or ‘annihilating’ their life.
4. UR is the only doctrine that has death being swallowed up by life. (If some are exterminated forever in death then death is still king over most people.)
Response:
Again this response is from a limited worldview. If people are exterminated forever (as in the doctrine of annihilation), then it is God who is King not death. Death is simply an instrument that God has created for His good plans. Death as such is not evil or an animated being. When the Apostle Paul states ‘Death, where is your sting, …’ this is pure Hebraic hyperbole to accentuate the power and beauty of eternal life. Paul knows that death is not a ‘being’. The reality is that death is the removal of God’s breath from an ‘animated being’ so that it becomes again purely matter and energy. It is therefore in a true sense the removal of God’s spirit. The only king here is the King of the Universe Himself!
5. The "difficult" texts that (seem to) teach the permanent, irredeemable extinction of the wicked do not bear up under a better paradigm of UR. That paradigm is that there is a special and limited salvation for believers in Christ (and that refers to "eternal life" which is the life of the age to come) and a more general and ultimate salvation pledged by God in the ages beyond. God is the Saviour of "the body" of Christ, but He is also the Saviour of the world (Eph. 5:23; John 4:42; I John 4:14; I Tim. 4:10, etc.) The Bible does teach the certain judgment and destruction of the wicked, but nowhere can this be shown to mean annihilation. Ultimately, every single knee and every single tongue will confess the Lordship of Christ to the glory of God.
My Response:
Firstly, the scriptures quoted here do not imply some second salvation, somehow separate to the salvation offered to all who repent. The Torah is the light of God and the love of Torah is the Way to redemption. Mankind can only find salvation through turning back to God. After all it is ultimately God who is the Saviour of the world and Yeshua, His Messiah and prophet who brings salvation by bringing man to his God and our God, the Almighty.
Further, you appear to be arguing that all mankind, not part of the ‘body of Christ’, will be raised after the age to come (the Millenial Age), not only to judgment, but to eternal life in the New Universe. There is however no scripture that comes close to stating that there is a further opportunity for the unrepentant to turn to God and find redemption and salvation in the New Universe. The whole theme of the Scriptures is that man has one life in which to repent and return to God. Nowhere does Scripture explicitly state that man will get a second chance in the New Universe. Not only is this not explicitly stated, the whole emphasis of Scripture is that man repent because the Kingdom is near, that is, today is the day to repent, not tomorrow or in the next life.
While some Universalists may try to argue that Isaiah speaks of children dying at 100 and that he is referring to the New Universe here, and that therefore there is in fact death in the New Universe, this is such an extreme stretch of credibility to argue that these second deaths and supposedly third lives, etc may eventually led to repentance and redemption!
It appears that UR is arguing here for re-incarnation. This doctrine however can not be found in scripture and it appears that it was never articulated in any authorative midrashic commentary.
As a doctrine of Gnosticism, it would appear to be strongly condemned in Deut 18:9-13
“When you have come into the land which Yahweh your God gives you, you shall not learn to do after the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found with you anyone who makes his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices sorcery, or an enchanter, or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or a consulter with a familiar spirit, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For whoever does these things is an abomination to Yahweh: and because of these abominations Yahweh your God does drive them out from before you. You shall be perfect with Yahweh your God.”
Such conjecture as you offer here, is, I believe so totally in conflict with the Hebraic nature of Scripture which deals in ‘living truth’, that is, in ‘right living’ and in grounding all future realities to today’s relationship with God and man.
Yes, every knee will bow and every tongue confess – the Apostle Paul in quoting Isaiah, is referring to Judgment Day and to the acknowledgement by all men that YHWH is God of all and that the Messiah is his Mediator and Judge. This does not mean that all are now ‘saved’ because of their Judgment Day recognition of this reality.
It does mean that all men have the truth revealed to them because with perfect judgment comes full comprehension. Those who have died unrepentant do not suddenly get a chance to repent when standing at the throne of judgment. The judgment seat is always a place for taking action and effecting consequences for an earlier action or actions. The ‘die has been cast’, - this is a place of finality, not a halfway house!
6. UR can be demonstrated to have been the general and earliest of the Church's position before it taught either annihilation-ism (Conditional Immortality) or eternal torment.
My Response:
Even if this is correct (and I have read some scholars that dispute this), it is of little consequence. ‘The Church’ since sometime between 70 and 110 AD was adrift in a sea of Hellenistic delusion. When it rejected it’s Hebraic roots and gave up the Sabbath and rejected the very words of Yeshua, which were always the words of Torah, it was already lost.
If the proto-Judaism of Yeshua’s time taught UR, then this would be a valid argument. Certainly, I can see no clear indication that the ‘church’ in the Apostle Paul’s day taught UR and neither I would argue did John in writing Revelation around 96 AD. After all, John wrote “Here is the patience of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God, and (have) the faith of Jesus.” (Rev 14:12).
I would argue that the ‘saint’s’ are the only ones who will enter the New Universe and as they are identified by having the faith that Yeshua had. This surely indicates that those who are unrepentant and willfully disobey Torah will not be part of the New Universe.
Perhaps the greatest error of UR is in the over-emphasis on the salvation of all in the New Universe, such that it neglects the historical demands of revelation. The Bible’s teaching is predominately about how to live right before God and one’s neighbour today. It is about the here and now.
Whenever the implications of a doctrine significantly reduces this central focus, then that doctrine needs to be seriously questioned. UR does this, because the real implication of UR is the repentance is not needed today; ‘living right’ is not the highest calling; the greatest two commandments (i.e. the 10 Words) of God are no longer central.
While sincere followers of Yeshua who already live obediently may see this implication as largely irrelevant to them, most who are introduced to this doctrine from a background of ignorance are very likely to respond naturally and easily to the inherent logic that God’s call on their life, His call to obedience is not pressing and therefore very much secondary to the lusts of the flesh.
Thus, I still see this doctrine as dangerous and a serious distraction.
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