N. T. Wright is a scholar that I’ve come to greatly admire over the past year, after reading his work on Paul and especially his four-volume series Christian Origins and the Doctrine of God. On the issue of universalism, however, I find many reasons to disagree strongly with him. I believe, for Scriptural and theological reasons, that God desires to save all people and will persist until his intention is fulfilled; Wright believes, on the other hand, that God desires to save all people, but he’ll stop persisting toward this end out of respect for some people’s free choice to reject him. Here, I’ll be responding to his 1978 Themelios article against universal salvation, to show why I think his analysis is ultimately flawed. [1]
‘There are two Biblical ways of looking at salvation. One says that only Christian believers will be saved: the other says that all men will be saved. Since the latter is more loving, it must be true, because God is love.’ This argument (though the words are mine) is regularly used by university teachers of my acquaintance to persuade undergraduates to accept ‘universalism’ in its most common form—the belief, that is, that God will save all men individually.
As a universalist, I would say that there’s only one biblical way of looking at salvation: it comes by grace, through faith in Jesus as Messiah and Lord, and ultimately all people will come to this faith (Rom. 10:8-13; cf. Phil. 2:9-11). Perhaps when Wright wrote this article, he’d only interacted with pluralistic universalists like John Hick and ‘hopeful universalists’ like von Balthasar, who see two different eschatologies in the Scriptures. Universalists like myself, who may be called ‘evangelical universalists’ or ‘biblical universalists’, see the Bible as a coherent story pointing toward Jesus the Messiah as its fulfillment, like Wright does.
It explicitly plays off passages of scripture which appear to support it (Romans 5:12–21, 11:32, 1 Tim. 2:4, 4:10, John 12:32, etc.) against those which quite clearly do not (Romans 2:6–16, Matt. 25:31–46, John 3:18, 36, 5:29, etc.). I have argued against this view elsewhere, at a more systematic level. Here I want to look in more detail at the biblical evidence. The proponents of universalism admit very readily that their doctrine conflicts with much biblical teaching. What they are attempting, however, is Sachkritik, the criticism (and rejection) of one part of scripture on the basis of another. We leave aside the implications of this for a doctrine of scripture itself.
Once again, it seems that Wright has mostly known pluralistic and ‘hopeful universalists’ who see in the Bible two distinct eschatologies. In his other article that he cites here, “Universalism and the World-Wide Community”, he interacts only with John Hick and John Robinson, both liberal theologians who rejected the Bible as a single, coherent story, and held that all religions contain some (relative) truths about God. As a ‘biblical universalist’, my view of the Scriptures is largely the same as Wright’s, so this criticism doesn’t really land.
More important for our purpose is the fact that the great majority of the ‘hard sayings’, the passages which warn most clearly and unmistakeably of eternal punishment, are found on the lips of Jesus Himself… I begin here because we need to be reminded of the uncompromising warnings which the evangelists place on the lips of Jesus Himself (and if they were creations of the early church, they are quite unlike anything else that the early church created).
I wonder what passages exactly Wright is referring to here. Is he talking about the ‘sheep and goats’ judgment (Matt. 25:31-46), which is the only one that explicitly speaks of “eternal punishment” (Gk: kolasis aiōnios)? But Wright himself has acknowledged elsewhere that aiōnios means “of the [Messianic] Age” rather than strictly “eternal” (e.g., How God Became King, pp. 44-45; see also Ramelli and Konstan, Terms for Eternity). In his NT translation, Wright typically translates zōē aiōnia as “life of the age to come,” but coupled with punishment, translates aiōnios as “everlasting” (compare his translation of Matt. 25:46 to Lk. 18:18) — why is this? Furthermore, Wright later claimed (and I agree) that the entire Olivet discourse, including the ‘sheep and goats’ judgment, refers to the AD 70 fall of Jerusalem, not a post-mortem punishment (Jesus and the Victory of God, pp. 184, 533).
Is he talking about the ‘Gehenna’ sayings of Jesus? But, once again, Wright acknowledges elsewhere that Jesus, when he spoke of ‘Gehenna’, was referring to the coming destruction on Jerusalem (JVG, pp. 183, 330), in line with the parallels in the Hebrew Bible (Jer. 7:30-34; 19:2-15) and the context of Jesus’ own saying (Matt. 23:33-38). Is he talking about the ‘narrow gate’ sayings of Jesus (Matt. 7:13-14; Lk. 13:22-30)? But, at least in the Lukan account, this is a warning against the person who asks, “Are few being saved?”, for failing to recognize that many unexpected people will be entering God’s kingdom! [2] Like some of Jesus’ other sayings (e.g., Matt. 10:39; 19:30), this saying is ironic and paradoxical: “many” are destroyed because they wish to be part of “few” who are saved, while the “few” are those who accept that “many” unexpected people will be saved!
Jesus does say that many will follow a “broad path” that leads to apōleian, “destruction” (Matt. 7:13). But he also affirms, in various parables, that he’ll pursue and find everyone he intends to save, even to apolōlos, “the destroyed-one” (Matt. 18:10-14; Lk. 15:3-32; 19:10). Wright and I agree (contra Calvinism) that Jesus desires to save everyone — his love for even his enemies, in imitation of his Father, is integral to his perfection (Matt. 5:43-48; Lk. 6:32-36). So Wright must believe that, at some point, Jesus will stop going after that 100th destroyed sheep.
Nor is there any tension between statements of God’s love and warnings of God’s judgment. If this is a problem for us, it certainly was not for them: compare John 3:16–21. Perhaps this is why many advocates of universalism abandon the attempt to argue their case from the Bible at all.
Of course, I agree that God’s love and his judgment aren’t in tension, and I’d point to the exact same passage to make my point. For Wright, however, his love and his judgment are in tension, because Wright believes that the judgment is hopeless; at some point, God stops trying to save some people. In contrast, for John, the purpose of judgment is “that all may honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (John 5:22-23); Jesus came not only to judge the world but also to save the world, and he judges the world to drag all people to himself! (12:31-32, 46-50) The judgment can’t be hopeless, because believers in Jesus were once under the same condemnation of “death” and “darkness” (John 5:24; 12:46; 1 John 2:9; 3:14).
The attempt is still made by some, however, usually on the basis of certain passages in the Pauline corpus (an odd inversion, this, of the old liberal position where Jesus was the teacher of heavenly truths and Paul the cross-grained dogmatic bigot). But at the same time most exegetes would agree that one of Paul’s foundation doctrines is justification by faith, which has its dark side in the implication: no faith, no justification. There are no problems of salvation (leaving aside for a moment the few passages in dispute) for those outside the believing community.
I agree with Wright that the doctrine of justification by faith, or covenant membership based on one’s faithfulness to Jesus the Messiah, is central to Paul’s teachings. I also agree that there’s no salvation outside of the believing community. However, the believing community who are loyal to Jesus will one day extend to all of humanity; every person will bow and confess that Jesus the Messiah is Lord (Phil. 2:9-11). The fact of justification by faith is no problem to ‘evangelical’ or ‘biblical universalists’, as we believe that all people will, in the end, be justified because of what Jesus did, through faith in him.
We will return to Paul in a moment, but before that we must look at a passage which has sometimes been used to get universalists round the awkward corner thus created—namely, 1 Peter 3:18–22, which has sometimes been interpreted as offering a ‘second chance’ to people who do not have faith in this life. But, as has been argued at length by commentators of various outlooks, the writer is most probably referring simply to Christ’s proclamation to evil spirits that their power had been broken.
I don’t think that any “awkward corner” has been created at all. The idea that one’s ‘free choice’ to accept or reject God is set in stone (and, consequently, no longer ‘free’) after death is an unsupported assumption. [3] So the fact that this assumption isn’t explicitly refuted in the Scriptures isn’t evidence in its favor. In this life, we’re all given first, and second, and as many chances as we need, because God does desire our salvation; why should it be different after death? Does God’s character change toward some people? In any case, if the Bible does declare that all people will be saved, this alone would be proof enough that there’s a ‘second chance’ after death. For what it’s worth, though, I agree with Wright that 1 Peter 3:18-22 isn’t good evidence of this.
In any case, the next chapter (1 Peter 4, especially vv. 17–18) rules out any possibility that ‘those who do not obey God’s gospel’ will be saved. The ‘second chance’ theory must look outside the Bible for support: though there, too, it is open to attack.
1 Peter 4:17-18 doesn’t refute the possibility of post-mortem repentance, because it’s not talking about a post-mortem judgment at all. Peter is speaking of the persecution that his audience is experiencing, the “fiery ordeal”; this is a krima, “judgment”, that has “begun at the house of God” (1 Pet. 4:12-17). But Peter gives them hope by telling them that this krima will envelop their persecutors, “those disobeying God’s good news”, as well (4:17). He quotes Proverbs 11:31 (LXX), saying that if it’s difficult for the righteous to be rescued (from persecution), how much more ho asebēs, “the ungodly”, and hamartōlos, “the sinner” (4:18)?
This whole passage deals with the coming tribulation that enveloped the Roman and Jewish worlds from AD 66-70, not the possibility of post-mortem salvation. We should hope that it’s possible for “ungodly-ones” (Gk: asebōn) and “sinning-ones” (Gk: hamartōlōn) to be saved, because Paul tells us that they’re precisely the ones whom Jesus died for! (Rom. 5:6-8) Of course, the ungodly aren’t saved as ungodly people (in their sins), only when they repent (and are saved from their sins). But since we were all ungodly at one time, we should hope that it’s possible for other people, who are now ungodly, to be saved as well!
We might note at this point that, though many profess to believe in a ‘second-chance’ universalism, they do not usually enjoy ‘assurance’ in the old-fashioned sense. Hence the revival of interest in praying for the dead (which does not, except in rare cases, spring from a return to the classical doctrine of purgatory, but rather from a vague general uncertainty about the way of salvation itself). Universalism of this kind, therefore, has the worst of both worlds: no clear doctrine of justification by faith, and hence no assurance of salvation. It neither has its cake nor eats it.
Perhaps this is true of the pluralistic universalists that Wright is acquainted with, but it’s not true of ‘biblical universalism’. Universalists like myself agree with Paul’s robust doctrine of justification by faith, and our assurance of salvation is that Jesus died for us, the same as Wright’s own assurance.
Part 2 (next week): N. T. Wright on Pauline universalist texts
______________________________
[1] N. T. Wright, “Towards a biblical view of universalism,” Themelios 4, no. 2 (Jan 1978): 54-58; unfortunately, I was unable to find any more recent study from Wright that specifically deals with universal salvation, but a recent interview suggests that he may have softened toward universalism while remaining a staunch Arminian.
[2] See my recent blog post on the ‘narrow gate’ sayings, and several other warnings of Jesus against assuming a limited scope of salvation: “Warnings against non-universalism”
[3] Hebrews 9:27 is the only verse that is typically adduced to support this position. However, that passage (Heb. 9:25-28) only uses the fact that there is a krisis (“judgment”) for everyone after they die once, as an analogy for the fact that Jesus had to die only once as a sacrifice to bring salvation. There’s no indication that this post-mortem krisis is followed by hopeless punishment for anyone.
No comments:
Post a Comment