“For the time that is past suffices…”

Last time I mentioned that I would give an argument about how “Christian Universalism [has] been able to grow” due in part to the fact that “[Christians] have weakened in our proclamation of the truth.”  That is my goal in this post and the one to follow.  

Before that however, I want to give you guys some reference point outside of myself for Christian Universalism (CU).  To start, you can pull up the Wikipedia article for CU  which gives the standard encyclopedia-type explanation of this belief.  From here you can check out the site for The Christian Universalist Association.  This is a loose ecumenical organization of “believers” who embrace the philosophy of CU.  On their site they give a rough statement of faith which we will use in the argument I’m about to present.  Their statement says:

1.  We believe in a God who is Love, Light, Truth, and Spirit, the Creator of the universe, whom we are called to seek, know, and love; and whose nature was revealed to the world in the person and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ.
2. We believe that the universal commandment is to love and serve one another as each loves oneself.
3. We believe in the law of justice by which actions generate consequences, whether to be manifested in this life or the life to come.
4. We believe in the ultimate triumph of divine mercy and grace: that no being ever created will be condemned or allowed to suffer forever, but God has arranged through a benevolent plan of learning and growth for all souls to attain salvation, reconciliation, restoration, and reunion with the Source of All Being, in the fullness of the ages.
5. We believe every person is the divine offspring of God, created in the image of the Heavenly Parent of all; and that every person is destined to be raised up from imperfection to maturity according to the pattern of the archetypal Christ, the Son of God, the Perfect Human in whose image all humanity shall be transformed.
6. We believe in miracles and mysterious spiritual phenomena, such as the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which transcend materialistic views of reality.
7. We believe that God’s Holy Spirit has inspired numerous prophets, saints, philosophers, and mystics throughout history, in a variety of cultures and traditions; and that by reading the Bible and other great texts of spiritual and moral wisdom with a discerning mind, and meditating to connect to the Spirit within, we may all gain a greater understanding of truth, which should be applied for the betterment of ourselves and our world.

Notice this is Christian Universalism because it purports to follow the God of the Bible, the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, and the expression of God through the Holy Spirit.  Certain sects also put an emphasis on Christ’s crucifixion in a particular way which we will look at later.

With that groundwork laid, here is my simple thesis.  I believe that there are many theological errors in the church today which are leading and/or contributing to a rise in the heretical beliefs of Christian Universalism, the four primary errors being a misunderstanding of the idea that “God is love,”  a misunderstanding of salvation by grace alone, the teaching of Free Grace theology as it pertains to perseverance, and the denial of the doctrine of a literal hell.  In this post I will deal with the misunderstanding of the phrase “God is love” leaving the others for a later post or two.

“God is love” is a phrase that many Christians recite which is taken from the context of the first epistle of John, chapter 4, verses 8 and 16:

Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. . . . So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

Right out of the gate this is a statement that we are inclined to like, no?  One of the most fundamental desires across mankind is to be loved, and so to know that God is love is a delightful piece of knowledge and is something that draws us to him.  A God that is love is a God that is likable to everybody.  So where does this go wrong?

Well, the moment we begin rejoicing in the fact that God is love (and thus that God loves us?) we almost assuredly start twisting things up.  The biggest problem here is that often times we say “God is love” with this in mind: there is this being named “God” and there is this concept called “Love” and “God is Love” means that whatever “Love” is, “God” is that also.  And where do we get the concept called “Love” from?  From ourselves.  Thus, identifying “God” with “Love” puts “God” as being subject to whatever it is that we envision “Love” as being.  This then returns to our point the other day about unconditional love.  So, we just import the idea of unconditional love into the concept of “Love,” say “God is Love,” and then *voila* God is bound to being unconditional in his love.  Therefore, he cannot expect anything of us and still be loving.  He can’t punish us and still be loving.  He certainly can’t condemn anyone to hell and still be loving.  And thus he doesn’t.  That’s Christian Universalism. 

But Psalm 115.3 says, “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases,” which articulates the point that God is autonomous and free to define himself, specifically in the realm of his nature, that he is not bound to any person’s concept of what “Love” is.  So instead of blindly asserting “God is love” all over the place, our churches would do better to articulate what “Love” truly is by exegeting how God defines love for us throughout his revelation in Scripture.  God cannot be held captive to man’s sinful design of love, and trying to do so puts us at risk of worshipping the “God” of Christian Universalism.