Overstepping Compassion (archived from October newsletter)
At the beginning of the year, I told many of my readers that one of my New Year's resolutions was to become better informed on the doctrines of Universalism and Restorationism, the idea that sooner or later, everyone ends up in Heaven. My interest was born from the fact that I was not-so-strangely attracted to this seemingly unbiblical doctrine. I hoped that, at the end of my research, I could embrace the idea that I would eventually be reunited with every friend I ever lost, on the other side of the Pearly Gates.

The inquiry started accidentally with a book called I'm Saved, You're Saved...Maybe, by Jack Renard Pressau. The book followed the five stages from new believer to maturity. It addressed the near-bibliolotry that accompanies young belief and says that something is true because the bible says it is (as opposed to the bible saying something is true, because it is). Those in the second-to-last stage of maturity say that God, while compassionate, is never unfair. I traveled with Pressau through those first four stages, taking it all in, and being awed by his flawless, logical, and rational deductions.

The last stage, however, adopted a Restorationist stance, and I secretly thought, finally, someone who can defend this idea so that I might embrace it. As I read on, I found only arrogance. It was as though the brilliant author had been replaced by a careless heretic.

I was almost instantly turned off to the idea then, but I pressed on. There seems to be a few early church fathers that adopted this idea, though because their words so closely resemble the scriptures that Restorationists use, I cannot rule out that they mean the same thing as the bible means. If the bible is not necessarily restorationist, then neither are they.

The clencher for me was Matthew 18:8, which says that some will be thrown into eternal fire. Those who believe that all will be saved try to substitute one Greek word for another to make it mean "an age of fire," but the change is unwarranted.

On a side note, the source of Universalism is, I believe, the confusion that results from defining God's love and "salvation." Nothing separates us from God's love, the scriptures say, but that doesn't mean that nothing can separate us from Heaven. Thier arguments are helped by Calvinist uses of the same scriptures to prove that one cannot forfeit their salvation. This may explain why some Calvinists, such as Karl Barth, eventually took that assertion to it's logical conclusion and became Universalists themselves. It's very similar to the way Arminians can take the additional step to become Open Theists, and believe that God cannot know the future outside of His own deductions.

It only took until October to finish out that resolution. Not bad, huh?