INTRODUCTION
1. When my brother called me vicious.
Was I wrong to tell my brother that universalism is a false teaching?
He called my comments "vicious." That's a good Bible word, and I guess my warnings to him about his present course were pretty harsh. But hey, I was in shock. This brother seemed to be such a stalwart soldier of the cross. He had given his life to the Lord and to the Lord's work. A no-compromiser for sure.
And here he was espousing universalism. All will be saved. No one will be lost. There is no eternal punishment.
I started out with warnings. I even suggested once, knowing his sense of humor, that perhaps he was putting all his Facebook friends on. He was going to lead us into thinking he had gone off the deep end so we would rise to the occasion and preach the truth online, for others to see. Then he would jump out of hiding, say "gotcha", and life would go on.
No. He really believes in the doctrine of inclusion. That all will be saved. No hell.
And yet in his eyes, I am vicious. Biblically that adjective applies to wolves, the kind that come in with no concern for the flock, and, well, eat the flock. Now that's vicious. I wanted to shake my brother, but not consume him. Not even hurt him.
The universalist heresy is decidedly vicious by the above description. Vicious on many counts. These are the ones that come to mind:
1. It allows man to continue on in his sin, since he knows that eventually all will be saved.
2. It nullifies the command for us to call all to repentance.
3. It denies the sinfulness of sin, suggesting that God should not judge it so severely.
4. It suggests that God is unjust to allow men to have an eternity without Christ. This sort of suffering is over the top.
5. It denies clear Scriptures that talk of eternal punishment, thus calling into question the inspiration of Scriptures.
6. It depends on the sayings of selected church fathers and even apocryphal writings to prop it up. The sufficiency of Scripture is thus also questioned.
7. It heavily leans on that most unworthy of supports, human reasoning and logic.
8. It draws no clear lines between righteous and unrighteous.
9. The entire missions program of the church, begun by the Great Commission of Jesus, is abrogated. All will be saved. Why go?
10. It applies faulty hermeneutics to writings of Paul, Peter, and John where there are sentiments that seem to support universalism.
11. It joins forces with all the major cults and the deepest feelings of carnal men all over the world. No one likes to be punished.
12. It assumes that if Jesus takes punishment for sin, man must never suffer consequences.
Any religious system that denies the Word, trusts man, belittles God, bypasses repentance, and espouses false promises to the unregenerate can only be called vicious. Awful. Damnable.
Oh people of God! Stay far from this poison and the wolves that promote it!
HISTORY of UNIVERSALIST THOUGHT
How long has this strange doctrine been among us?
2. A pernicious persistent weed...
The fact that fathers and other church leaders through the years have proclaimed a faith in Universalist principles is proof only of the persistence of the Satanic hosts, not of the Spirit's will being infused into the Body. There are persons who might look at a portion of my yard and determine that clover and crab grass are the norm, while bluegrass is an exception to it. Prevalence of lies does not replace the Truth, but in the minds of believers establishes it.
Jesus, Paul, John, Peter... they did not teach universalism. We must look elsewhere for its origins. And this particular aberration seems to have been sprinkled throughout history, giving rise to the boldness of modern adherents, as they point to this or that weed-grower and say "Aha! You see, this thing is not new."
Definitely not new. But not old enough to count, either. As early as the second century one will find a mishmash of "utterances" put together in book form and known as the Sibylline Oracles. Some were written by Christians, some by Jews. Some are good, some are simply pagan. They were rejected early on as inspired of God. But they do seem to favor our subject.
Some church fathers of this time seem to have been swayed toward universalism. In studying other cult beliefs I have found that the church fathers, as wonderful as they might have been in much of their teaching and lives, are not reliable sources of truth. They contradict one another and the Scriptures.
From the mid third century on, universalism was picked up by heretic groups such as the Manicheans. These were simply gnostics in Christian form. The gnostic heresy had already been condemned by the apostle John in his first epistle. But some of their teachings hung on.
Manicheans helped give birth to certain Protestant groups before the Protestant Reformation. Some of the following were closer to the Scriptures than others, all had a form of universalism: The Albigenses (who declared false teachings about the nature of Jesus), the Waldenses, the Lollards.
Origen, fourth century, is the most famous adherent of the doctrine of inclusion. You remember Origen? He is the one who proposed that in the great falling away from God, those who fell furthest became the demons and those who fell least became humans. Yes, he said, all of them will be eventually restored to God. How so? Why, even after death, their purification process will continue.
All punishment, he said, is remedial, meant only to reconcile God and man. And even when a man is in eternal hell he can repent and be restored. He never explained why the good who make it to heaven cannot regress.
Origen conformed more to Plato than to Scripture. He and many of his doctrines were condemned by the church in 543 at a Council in Constantinople. Origen is considered by conservative scholars in our own day a truly dangerous teacher who needs to be ignored.
This sprinkling of universalist thought through the centuries finally gave birth to a distinct denomination in 1770 England.
Throughout all this time, in spite of the minimal presence of the teaching, most Christian people believed in an eternal hell. But as the 1800's dawned, this doctrine came to be abandoned by many, or at least changed to annihilation. Liberal scholarship in particular assumed that all would one day be either gone altogether or safe with God.
Enter Charles Darwin. Here in his studies was confirmation that life is in progression, that we are only at a particular stage of growth now. The theologians added that it was to be continued after death. This in opposition to the Biblical account of a final state of mankind, to be determined by events here and now.
In this century the doctrine found a champion in Schleiermacher, and in the next, in Brunner and Barth. In the case of the latter, they were not able to affirm universalism fully, but not able to deny it either.
In the first centuries of this heresy, for heresy it is, a division from the Truth handed down to the Church, Scriptures were twisted and mangled and made to fit. But with Biblical exegesis clearly favoring eternal punishment, the tactic came to be simply to deny the texts that seemed to be out of line. They appealed to the "spirit" of the text, the great love of God, the nature of Jesus. That is, their interpretation and personal feeling about such.
So, when all is said and done, we have a merely human position given to us by, well, merely humans. Some of it is logical enough. It meshes with our own fears and queries at times. But it does not match up to the record given us by foundational apostles.
As with every subject I have investigated, it is this matter only that concerns me. I care not what Origen and Augustine said. I definitely am not worried about Brunner and Barth. I want to know what the hand-picked writers of our New Covenant, those who gave their lives to be witnesses of Jesus, had to say.
I shall pursue this line of thought, the Biblical one, by God's grace, in days to come.
Reference for this historical outline: Universalism, a historical survey, Richard Bauckham. Available online at www.theologicalstudies.org.
