Under the breath of many Christians who raise objections to universalism you can hear them say, “but universalism has always been a minority tradition. How can all the infernalist greats like Augustine and Aquinas be wrong? How can so many pastors, priests, and ministers—including some who are hardly of the intolerant, fire-breathing sort—be wrong?” Indeed. (In fact, according to David Bentley Hart, for the first few hundred years of Christianity universalism just might have been more than a minority position. But let that go for now.)
Well, we should not forget what a shock it must have been to the Roman Catholic world to be confronted by some obscure German monk in the early 16th century and told that the Pope himself, the Vicar of Christ, was wrong, terribly wrong, in a number of very serious ways. Besides, is Christianity or is it not a revolution? If it is, (and it is) it should not be too surprising to expect it might change drastically in a number of ways over the years, that it might teach us things that either are in scripture but have never been seen there, or which might not be in scripture at all. (I am leaving aside for the time being the question of whether universalism is scriptural or not.) But must the truth of God be small enough that it can be packed in one book and tied up in a bow with no significant, new developments for almost two thousand years? How were Jews during and shortly after the time of Christ expected to follow Jesus if religion is simply a matter of following extant texts in ways that were already prescribed? Wasn’t Jewish scriptural tradition always evolving anyway? And were not its ways of reading far more creative than some of the arid Christian fundamentalism one encounters? And what of the pagans? Were they not being asked by Christianity to throw over—contemptuously even—certain of their beliefs and practices that had been held dear for countless generations? If Christianity upset the apple cart of history some two thousand years ago, we should not be too surprised if within Christianity itself old certainties are to be overthrown.
Or are we to believe that it is only the hallowed “us,” the Christian tradition, which has no need of revolution?
“As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen,” is not a reference to human understanding, even of the most enlightened sort.