The recent book by Rob Bell, Love Wins, has reopened the controversial topic about the ultimate spiritual destiny of mankind – will every person, no matter what, be reconciled ultimately back to God through his bountiful love in Christ’s sacrificial death and live eternally in His presence, or will Judgment Day separate some men and women to eternal separation from God, that is to Hell, while others, through the reconciling work of Christ on the Cross, spend eternity with God?

The month of May will be devoted to exploring this question.  We thought that there is no better place to discuss this heated topic then at your local seminary.  We have asked D. Scott Reichard, a local proponent of “ultimate reconciliation,” and Dr. Aaron Bird, an adjunct Professor at Urbana Seminary and specialist on the doctrine of Hell – who will be teaching a summer course at Urbana Seminary called “Evil, Hell & Universalism” – to discuss the matter for us on our blog.

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A text without a context is a pretext for a prooftext.  A text without a context is a pretext for a prooftext.  Say it again.  A text without a context is a pretext for a prooftext.  In the same way my basketball coach encouraged me to persistently practice my “shooting follow-through”  – to mature from a two-handed shot to a proper one-handed shot – so, too, in order to understand the original meaning of the biblical text it behooves us to continually consider the hermeneutical catchphrase, “A text without a context is a pretext for a prooftext.”

The UR blog post opened with a flurry of scriptural citations/quotes.  Twenty-three of them, with zero contexts.  My dog has cited a verse before, Proverbs 26:11, when she “returned to her vomit,” but citing verses without context illustrates precisely the Proverbs 26 context: foolishness.  There’s irony in the prooftext verses to boot.  Many of them could disprove UR; unless, of course, there is no context, then we can make them say whatever we want just as the Catholic Church predicted Protestants would do when they foretold, “You will turn the Scriptures this way and that, like a wax nose.”  Simply citing verses is like my two-handed shot; it will get shot-blocked every time.

The blog post then asks us to reconsider salvation in terms of the Law, that Paul was chosen because he was a Law expert, and that the gospel is a Lawful gospel.  I’m pretty sure the Apostle Paul himself spent his days combating this toxic notion, and that the author of Hebrews considers this “to be walking backwards towards Sinai.”  Indeed, the author of Hebrews said there’s something better: Sola gratia – Sola fide – Sola Christus.  So what if person X can keep the Law a bit better than person Y, keeping the Law is like trying to touch the moon and neither person X nor Y can touch the moon with her own jumping abilities.  And even if Scott was only trying to say Jesus fulfills the Law, which I would concur Jesus does, it proves nothing about UR.

UR’s control belief is divine love.  I’m all for divine love too.  A persistent problem with it acting as a control belief for UR, however, is that on its account love ironically… loses.  If God imposes His will in a coercive manner to break our freedom and, consequently, all meaning of a genuine relationship, then love loses.  Given free will is part and parcel of divine love, the Christian philosopher, John Sanders, rightly states, “[They] claim God can bring about the reconciliation of all free creatures, but they never plausibly demonstrate how this can be if the creatures remain forever free.”

C.S. Lewis does applaud UR’s heart for humanity when he writes, “I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully: ‘All will be saved.’”  The key word for Lewis is “truthfully” and, as such, he continues, “Without their will, or with it?  If I say, ‘Without their will,’ I at once perceive a contradiction; how can the supreme voluntary act of self-surrender be involuntary?  If I say, ‘With their will,’ my reason replies, ‘How if they will not give in?’”

This is not an argument between Sovereignty and free will, either, in the sense that I’ve been reading on the blog posts.  Human beings never chose to have free will; rather, God in his vast sovereignty freely chose to grant sentient beings free will.  God has sovereignly reserved the right to reconcile the world as such.  God unilaterally begins the process and, while some things are divinely caused, such as how salvation can occur, others are not, such as our self-surrender.  Just because we see God determining some things in Scripture does not mean we deduce this to a universal principle that He determines all salvific things; similarly, just because we see people making free libertarian choices for salvation, it does not mean there is no external influence.  God can influence, but influencing is not coercing/strong-arming.

Skipping with my daughter in the park, holding my wife under a beach sunset, playing chess with the homeless in Hollywood, and doing cartwheels on the eternal streets of gold with my dad are not worth having without free will.  The UR camp has asserted the orthodox view is insulting to God and, yet, when UR strips humanity of free will, the God of love loses.

With libertarian free will, there can be external influence on a person and this person can genuinely choose heaven or hell.  God sovereignly (and astonishingly) grants this person the power of contrary choice.  Free will neither saves nor condemns, however; it is God alone who forgives and saves, while free will means throwing our hands up in surrender.  In light of this, the theologian Donald Bloesch puts it more astutely, “All people have been redeemed objectively and de jure, but only the believer is redeemed in toto and de facto.”

Lewis is rightly relentless, then, with this view: “In creating beings with free will, omnipotence from the outset submits to the possibility of . . . defeat.  What you call defeat, I call miracle: for to make things which are not Itself and thus to become . . . capable of being resisted by its own handiwork, is the most astonishing and unimaginable of all the feats we attribute to the Deity.”

And do not say there is nothing God cannot do (or “God can do anything”) unless you are ready to admit God can catch the flu virus, suffer from HIV, and commit suicide.  There are some things God cannot do.  One of those things is guaranteeing a world where libertarian freedom exists and evil/hell does not.

This choosing of hell relates to the blog posts about “In Adam’s fall, we fell all” questions.  I agree with the aforementioned Bloesch who contends that Adam’s fall does not chiefly mean his sin and guilt were transferred to the rest of humanity.  Rather, what is transferred is the same ability to choose evil which is now “an inborn state” in human beings.  Our free will is part of the wiring of what it means to be a human being and it automatically entails a hereditary distance from “the other,” including Deity.  We can use this neutral hereditary distance to either choose a relationship with the Trinity or choose the diabolical self.

This inborn diabolical self scenario leads to my final responsive point.  Scott quipped, “Everyone loves to have their Hell be just full of Hitler and his friends.”  Number one: I’m not sure Hitler had friends; and, two, hell is not about Hitler, Genghis Khan, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, or Bin Laden.  Hell is about you and me.  It is about me.  Now it makes a lot of sense.

by Aaron Bird, Adjunct Professor at Urbana Theological Seminary

The recent book by Rob Bell, Love Wins, has reopened the controversial topic about the ultimate spiritual destiny of mankind – will every person, no matter what, be reconciled ultimately back to God through his bountiful love in Christ’s sacrificial death and live eternally in His presence, or will Judgment Day separate some men and women to eternal separation from God, that is to Hell, while others, through the reconciling work of Christ on the Cross, spend eternity with God?

The month of May will be devoted to exploring this question.  We thought that there is no better place to discuss this heated topic then at your local seminary.  We have asked D. Scott Reichard, a local proponent of “ultimate reconciliation,” and Dr. Aaron Bird, an adjunct Professor at Urbana Seminary and specialist on the doctrine of Hell – who will be teaching a summer course at Urbana Seminary called “Evil, Hell & Universalism” – to discuss the matter for us on our blog.

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PAUL’S PREACHING OF THE RESTORATION OF ALL THINGS:
Jesus states “Paul is a chosen instrument of mine to proclaim the Gospel” (Acts 9:15).   Of himself, Paul says “the Gospel I preach was not received from man nor was it taught to me by the other Apostles (who had a few things wrong about the extent of the Atonement)  but I received the revelation directly from Jesus Christ” (Galatians 1:12-17).  Paul later calls the “Riches of God’s glory the hidden mystery” (Colossians 1:19-27).  Peter refers to Paul’s Evangel as “one hard to understand” (2 Peter 3:16). God and His Sovereign ways are indeed hard to understand (Romans 9).

So, maybe we should look at what Paul says about the “Restoration of All Things as spoken of by the Prophets” (Acts 3:21) for some insight as his Epistles seem curiously full of references:
Romans 5:12-21 “As Death came to All men thru Adam, Life came to the (same) “All men” thru Christ”
Romans 9:16 “It does not depend on man’s will but God’s mercy”
Romans 9:19 “Who can resist the Will (Boulema) of God?”
Romans 11:26 “All Israel shall be saved”
Romans 11:32 “God has committed them All to disobedience, that He might have mercy on All”
Romans 14:11 “Every knee shall bow and Every tongue confess”
1 Corinthians 13:8 “Love never fails”
1 Corinthians 15:22 “For as in Adam All Die, even so in Christ (the same) All shall be made alive”
1 Corinthians 15:28 “When All things are made subject to Him, then…that God may be All in All”
2 Corinthians 5:19 “God was in Christ Reconciling the world to Himself”
Ephesians 1:9-11 “He might gather together in one All things in Christ, both which are in heaven and earth–in Him….who works All things according the Counsel of His will.”
Philippians 2:10-11 “At the name of Jesus Every knee will bow and Every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”
Philippians 3:21 “He is able even to subdue All things to Himself”
Colossians 1:19-20 “It pleased the Father..by Him to Reconcile All things to Himself whether things on Earth or in Heaven”
1 Timothy 2:3-4,6 “God will have All men to be saved”
Hebrews 2:8 “God has put All things in Subjection, nothing is left that is not in Subjection”
Hebrews 8:8-12 “All shall know Me”

Everyone loves to have their Hell be just full of Hitler and his friends.  But most every Church leader will tell you that, “Everyone is Born going to Hell due to Adam’s sin” (Original sin).  That is why some denominations baptize “often and early.”  Does Everlasting Conscious Torture seem fair and “Lawful” punishment for the 12 year old girl who dies in a car wreck on her way to the confessional?  My old church Pastor (who has since changed his mind after reading our book Hope Beyond Hell) insisted we get baptized as quick as we could to avoid Hell.

What puts the Fear of God in me now is Christ’s teachings in Matthew 5 and 7 where He says, “Many will say on that day did we not prophesy and  perform miracles etc. and then I will say depart from me you who practice Lawlessness” and “I came to fulfill the Law and All of it will be accomplished. Anyone who annuls any of these law commandments or teaches otherwise shall be called least in the Kingdom of Heaven.”  I think Paul had the same concern many of us who embrace UR have.  He was not afraid of being Tortured in Hell, he was motivated and concerned about not attaining the First Resurrection, being faithful to Christ, seeing his brethren face judgment and missing the greatest Eon of history.

Teaching a Lawless Gospel appears to have dire “Eonian” consequences.   ET and UR (and the systems of theology that flow from each) can’t both be Lawfully correct.  Discerning therefore the biblically Legal one should take on particular significance for those of us reading these blogs as we all are now becoming accountable for what we are discussing.  If I am wrong, I want to know about it and will be very thankful but I humbly ask for convincing evidence.

Is it possible that God chose Paul not only for his passion but because he was an expert in the Law (unlike his fellow fishermen and tax collecting friends)?  Was Christ by having Paul skip the Apostolic Consultation and taking him directly to Arabia (likely symbolically near Sinai itself) wanting to give Paul a slightly different perspective on the Law that would lead men to Christ?   Could it be possible that whereas Paul used the Law to condemn and kill before his conversion, he use it now to save after he understood what Christ was accomplishing on the Cross by fulfilling the Legal terms of Redemption in buying back All that was lost in Adam?  Could the true Good News be that “God was in Christ Reconciling the World to Himself”–a mystery hidden from the Foundation until Christ and fully explained by Paul.

I believe that Paul received fresh revelation from Christ Himself on the Terms of Redemption, the application of  the Ownership and Liability Laws to the Reconciliation, Jesus as the  Kinsman Redeemer, Overcomers as First Fruits that sanctify the entire Harvest, how the Restitution Laws play themselves out in the Lake of Fire, the Jubilee  significance etc.  He was also shown that the Feast Days of Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles prophesied of the progression of the Restoration.  And I believe that Paul was also now clear on the full impact of  the progression of the Noahic, Abrahamic and Mosaic Covenants that led to Jesus ratifying the New Covenant.

Paul sums it up best in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28 , “All those who died in Adam will be made alive in Christ (the 2nd Adam) but each in his own order.”  How much clearer can Paul be?

So, then it is not a matter of “if” as that was settled with Christ at Calvary.  It becomes a matter of “when” and by “what” Judgments (if any) we each enter the Kingdom.  We are to preach Christ Crucified.  Blessed are those who receive Him now and inherit the First Resurrection. For those Saints will judge Angels and aid in the bringing about the Restoration of All things.  Still others must face the Lake of Fire and it’s corrective Judgments until All is in subjection, death destroyed and God be All in All.

by Scott Reichard

The recent book by Rob Bell, Love Wins, has reopened the controversial topic about the ultimate spiritual destiny of mankind – will every person, no matter what, be reconciled ultimately back to God through his bountiful love in Christ’s sacrificial death and live eternally in His presence, or will Judgment Day separate some men and women to eternal separation from God, that is to Hell, while others, through the reconciling work of Christ on the Cross, spend eternity with God?

The month of May will be devoted to exploring this question.  We thought that there is no better place to discuss this heated topic then at your local seminary.  We have asked D. Scott Reichard, a local proponent of “ultimate reconciliation,” and Dr. Aaron Bird, an adjunct Professor at Urbana Seminary and specialist on the doctrine of Hell – who will be teaching a summer course at Urbana Seminary called “Evil, Hell & Universalism” – to discuss the matter for us on our blog.  This week Dr. Bird address Mr. Reichard’s previous post.

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I’m rather surprised my Universalist friend, Scott, utilized church history as his argument, essentially blaming Augustine and the King James Version for hoodwinking Christendom into the dark doctrine of hell. Scores of credible and celebrated theologians supported the orthodox view of hell throughout church history and many of them predate Augustine. Indeed, the doctrinal stability of the orthodox view throughout church history stuns even church historians, especially given the diverse places, different times, and distinct traditions from which a vast number of sources championed it. To name a few: Ignatius of Antioch (A.D. 117); Clement of Alexandria (c. 195); Justin Martyr (150); Polycarp (c.112); Theophilus of Antioch (c. 181); Tertullian (c. 197); Hippolytus (c. 215); Lactantius (c. 240); Cyprian of Carthage (c. 252); Basil of Caeasarea (c. 330); Jerome (c. 347); and, John Chrysostom (c. 349).

Christian creeds and councils contain it too: The Apostle’s creed (ca. mid-2nd century); Nicene and Niceno-Constantinopolitan creeds (“judge the living and the dead”); and, the Athanasian creed (ca. 4th-6th centuries). This was then affirmed in the Chalcedonian definition in 451, with the theologians at the council of Constantinople, the fifth ecumenical council (553) and the Fourth Lateran (1215), and then again with the thinkers at the Diet of Augsburg in the Augsburg Confession (1530). The popes, Reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin, and the father of Methodism, John Wesley, all affirmed the orthodox view of hell too.

The rich church history of affirming the orthodox view of hell makes the crisp words of the credible church historian, Thomas Oden, seem like an understatement, “It is hard to think of any Christian teaching that has stronger biblical precedent and greater traditional consensus than this teaching of hell.”

I know it’s fashionable to treat Augustine as a whipping boy, but blaming Augustine does not convince me of Universalism. It also trivializes all the aforementioned theologians who believed the orthodox view before Augustine was even born. What’s more shocking is the sweeping implication that the apostle Paul did not teach on hell just because he did not employ the word “hell” often. This kind of thinking confuses a concept with a word; Paul was not concerned with a word as much as he was with the concept of the ultimate destiny of those outside of Jesus Christ, to which he talks about in great length. While sitting in a pew at Mars Hill Church I can point to a man on stage (Rob Bell) and speak of him in many ways – a man, a white man, preacher, dad, loving husband, poet, not a theologian, author – without ever saying his name and the people next to me will know who the words refer to. Paul does the same thing with the eschatological reality of hell when he refers to it with the words “perish,” “destroy,” “destruction,” “wrath,” “condemn,” “condemnation,” “judge,” “judgment,” “curse/d,” “eternally condemned,” “punish,” and “trouble and distress.”

It should give us latecomer theologians some pause when we witness a colossal contemporary assault on a doctrine so interwoven into the very fabric of church thought. Indeed, to rebuff an almost two-thousand year-old ecumenical consensus rests on the Universalists shoulders. And, yet, I did not hear one – not one – claim for Universalism in the initial post. I consider myself to be open-minded in my theological thirst for God; the cherry picking of evidence and skating over history, however, only paints a picture of an overstated attack, one that strangely tries to utilize church history in an attempt to debunk on one of the most stable doctrines in all of church history, thereby cutting its own throat.

by Dr.  Aaron Bird, Adjunct Professor at Urbana Theological Seminary

The recent book by Rob Bell, Love Wins, has reopened the controversial topic about the ultimate spiritual destiny of mankind – will every person, no matter what, be reconciled ultimately back to God through his bountiful love in Christ’s sacrificial death and live eternally in His presence, or will Judgment Day separate some men and women to eternal separation from God, that is to Hell, while others, through the reconciling work of Christ on the Cross, spend eternity with God?

The month of May will be devoted to exploring this question.  We thought that there is no better place to discuss this heated topic then at your local seminary.  We have asked D. Scott Reichard, a local proponent of “ultimate reconciliation,” and Dr. Aaron Bird, an adjunct Professor at Urbana Seminary and specialist on the doctrine of Hell – who will be teaching a summer course at Urbana Seminary called “Evil, Hell & Universalism” – to discuss the matter for us on our blog.  We have asked Mr. Reichard to write our first blog.  Dr. Bird will respond to Mr. Reichard’s comments next week.

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HELL’S BACKGROUND:  The story of how the Hell Fire Eternal Torment (ET) Doctrine came to be current Orthodoxy is an intriguing tale.  The Hell Fire with which we are all most familiar as most know, is no where to be found in the Old Testament (OT).  It is also interesting to note that many Bibles today (i.e. Young’s, Rotherham, Concordant, Weymouth, Zondervan parallel, New American, Original Bible Project etc.) do not even have the word Hell in them.  The King James Version (KJV) seems to be the one version loaded with Hell (54 times) as it translates Sheol, Hades and Gehenna as Hell throughout the Bible (Hell being an old English word meaning “to cover” such as when you “hell the roof”).  As for these KJV words translated Hell, Paul used the term Hades once but only in the sense of victory in 1 Corinthians.  James used the term Gehenna once but only as a metaphor for the underlying power of our words.  John never uses the Hell words. Jesus referred to Gehenna (the garbage dump outside Jerusalem) on Four teaching occasions in Matthew when mainly referring to the Pharisees.  We must not, of course, make light of these warnings by Jesus, we just need to understand what He is saying when referring to Gehenna in these passages and why only in Matthew do they seem to occur.  Regarding Church History, none of the early Church Creeds expressed Everlasting Torture for sinners and the First Four Church Councils were silent on the subject. In addition, Four of the Six early Schools of Theology (Alexandria, Caesarea, Antioch and Edessa) taught the Lake of Fire was Temporal and Restorative instead of Eternally Punitive (ET).  Only the School in Carthage (which included Rome and where Augustine was Bishop 400 A.D.) taught the doctrine of Everlasting Torment.  So, it may be wise to take a good look at the life of Augustine and the Roman West for answers to the question of how we ended up with today’s Eternal Hell Fire teaching as Orthodoxy.

AUGUSTINE, ORIGEN’S FATE AND FIFTH CHURCH COUNCIL INFLUENCE: Everlasting torture for sinners was a minority opinion up until Augustine (354-430).  Augustine championed the ET doctrine after the Pagan sack of Rome in 410 A.D. relying on his interpretation of the Latin Vulgate (Greek Aion specifically) and explaining how pagans could defeat spiritual Rome in his famous book two years later in 412 entitled The City of God. Unfortunately, Augustine was ignorant of Greek. In his book Augustine of  Hippo (page 36), Peter Brown states, “Augustine’s failure to learn Greek was a momentous casualty of the late Roman educational system; he will become the only Latin philosopher in antiquity to be virtually ignorant of the Greek language.”  And what was worse, in time the Latin Church no longer saw the need to learn Greek and this deficiency indirectly perpetuated the ET error with little chance of correction.  Peter Brown goes on to say, “gradually the learned fellowship would cease to feel the need for Greek books. For they had Augustine.”  (Ibid., p. 272).   Then during this same general time period, through a series of unfortunate events, Origen (180-253 A.D.—the first to write a systematic theological commentary on the whole Bible and by far the most influential Christian writer of his time but relatively unknown in the Latin West) was condemned as a heretic by men out for revenge and political gain. This led to the Fifth Church Council in 553 attended by only 148 Bishops anathematizing Origen not on Restoration teaching grounds but other issues.  In time, the Latin West “threw out the baby with the bath water” as they “had Augustine” and set the theological tone for the Church replacing the influence of the Eastern Church Fathers for years to come.  We then entered the Dark Ages with of course no Internet and no Bibles and the folks mainly getting their information from what Leaders handed down to them.  We then see a revival of thought in the Reformation with Bibles finally in hand and men like Luther, John Milton, John Wesley, Charles Wesley and others questioning the doctrine of Eternal Torment.  Many teachers during this time and earlier also practiced the ”Doctrine of Reserve” whereby they held the Doctrine of Ultimate Salvation for themselves but felt that it was not safe for the multitudes, and thus taught them Endless Perdition to keep them in line. This is why you see quotes going both directions from many of these teachers.  A much larger resurgence of questions surrounding ET occurred in the 20th Century with new Bible translations beyond the KJV coming out and men like John Stott and and John Wenham taking issue.  Then fresh in today’s news are men like Rob Bell and many others again questioning the view as Orthodoxy.  Eternal Torment (ET) is a Doctrine that few people really believe but who keep saying is true based on the strong tradition they think it has had for the last 1600 years.  R. Albert Mohler states it well in the book Hell under Fire, (p.16) ”The traditional doctrine of Hell now bears the marks of “odium theologium”– an embarrassing artifact with few defenders”–yet it continues to terrorize millions. Is it finally time to end the Tradition of Everlasting Punishment (ET) before it further mars the Character and Nature of God?