Category: universalism

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THE BODY OF CHRIST AND INDIVIDUALISM

The doctrine of eternal damnation helped create the concept of the individual.  The overarching embrace of the Roman Catholic church held forth the promise to this now terrified individual the possibility of salvation within the body of an eternal collective, the Church.

But this same church held out also the threat of damnation, which threat itself alienated, fragmented the collective more deeply into numerous individuals.  In the midst of a tendency to threaten us with damnation and then wink and say slyly, “just be good, take communion, and don’t worry about it,” up rose Luther who took damnation very seriously, and Protestantism became the struggle of individuals not to be damned, but in the midst of this struggle individualized even further the organs of Christ’s body.  Increasingly, as the obsession with individual damnation became more intense and conscious, the body of Christ fragmented into Catholic and Protestant, and then into countless Protestant denominations.  Much of the conflict between the two churches was over this: how shall the individual be saved?  Just as the first step – one might argue – to the Nazi holocaust was the unquestioned assumption (in the 19th century, before there was even a Nazi party) that there was such a thing as a “Jewish Problem,” after which much ink would be spilled over what, specifically, the “problem” was and what to do about it, the Christian holocaust against the soul began with the assumption that there was a soteriological problem on the individual level.

Once this coup was achieved, it was simply a matter of time before any powerful or empowering vision of a Christian Collective was increasingly weakened, disempowered to the point where the church could become a mishmash of angry, frightened, depressed, or indifferent individuals who cannot stand up to the world, who see the Kingdom of God as none of their business, and see politics as being beneath the contempt of religiously minded people or merely an authoritarian meddling in the rights of those not in the same faith.  “Where is the body of Christ?” one might ask them, and if they answer what they truly think, it would be this: “elsewhere.”

Thus does our conception of the individual take root in the mysterious and thoughtless rejection of the doctrine of universal salvation, become exacerbated under Roman Catholicism with its avoidance of the issue, and made worse with Protestantism. 

Is it any wonder that Protestantism, if it played its role in the birth of capitalism as per Max Weber—and I believe it did—should thereby have given forth the launching pad for the next and most extreme and destructive stage of individualism: capitalism?

In the meantime, who was left to take up the mantel of the collective self since the church had cast it off?  Communism (in the broad and correct sense of that word, not the perverted “communism” of the Soviet Union) whose efforts were often heroic and, yes, loving, was left with this task.

But this collective body in communism was conceived not as the body of Christ, for the Christian churches had turned that conception into a corpse of itself to be venerated in a tomb far from empty, and which was by  no means allowed to be site of a rebirth on or kin to this Earth.  Truly, the Body of Christ was to be a neverlandish affair entirely, the business of God alone.  The churches carried away this body and deprived and secularized and thereby disabled the promising bloom of the collective subject known as communism.

Thus was the church deprived of its earthly reality and communism of the soul it might have had, the church becoming thereby a ghost, and communism a corpse.  What was to be the marriage of Heaven and Earth was abandoned.

The church and the communists were conceived then as natural enemies when they are by nature one and of the same collective.

But tragically, whenever communism failed, especially ethically, this failure was attributed to its atheism and to its belief in the collective.  The first of these criticisms has truth in it, but not in the way the critics think.  The second criticism is a lie.

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UNIVERSALISM AND FREE WILL

They worry that if universalism is true, we have no free will–and that therefor life is meaningless.  But they are wrong.  In universalism, it is assured that each of us shall arrive at heaven; but perhaps how and when we get there is up to us.  In that is the story of each of us, our meaning.  One may watch a play knowing it is a comedy or a tragedy, and therefor knowing that certain important things about the end are inevitable.  Does that make the play meaningless?  Does it spoil it for us?  Indeed, perhaps the inevitability of a certain kind of ending is the very thing that gives the rest of the play its meaning.

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HELL IS POLITICAL

Many of the early Christians were very cheerful, very good, very fearless.  There was a real danger they might have no fear of death; and this would never do.  Christ came to defeat sin and death, and death is a much reduced master if he is not feared.  Fortunately, there was an answer: the Christians’ faith in the resurrection could not be easily shaken; but it could be more easily twisted.

Enter hell.  The solution was simple.  If people do not fear anything in this life because their deepest faith is in the life to come, make that life to come uncertain: not by denying its reality, but by making that reality potentially terrifying.  Tell them that they very well will live forever after they die, but that they must step very carefully in this life or end up in perpetual torment.

And so death, the retreating ancien regime, poisoned the wells for the advancing revolutionaries who were overthrowing him; he re-established his foothold on Earth in the very midst of a church that was to lead the revolution against him.  For now, Christians again lived in fear.  And their fear of the next world gave them all the vices and weaknesses people experience when their fears are only of this one.

The pagan world of the Middle East had believed in a dark and shadowy afterlife, a world of shades and shadows, of ghostly spirits who had forgotten their Earthly lives and wandered forever in gloom.  This miserable fate had been thought to await all but a few privileged ones favoured by the gods for whatever reason.  But now, after the victory of Christ, this shadowy underworld was superseded in its misery and terror by the Christian hell.

Thus it is that in wars and revolutions, the enemy puts up such resistance that one looks back longingly, like the Hebrews in the desert after leaving Pharoah, upon a time that was miserable, but less miserable than now.  Would it not have been better to make bricks without straw under a tyrant than be where we are now?   Would it not have been better to submit to death, its power and propaganda, to be “realistic” and bow to his “natural” reign, than rebel and find ourselves cast into the flames?

But not so fast.  For death never had power to make a hell, only the fear of it.  Death never cast us into the flames but only into the fear of them.  Death has enlisted us against ourselves in his war against us, and we need not commit this self-betrayal.  Nor need we believe that the rise of hell as a propaganda pinion of the Church was ever inevitable, or, even if inevitable, need we see it as anything other than a tremendous bluff, which itself is doomed inevitably to fall.

Hell is decidedly political.

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THE ODDS OF SALVATION

They say that humans must have free will to be important, to love and be loved.  Therefor, it is inevitable some will choose to reject God.  And choosing to reject God is to put oneself in hell.

Therefor, they say, hell is justified.

But is it actually inevitable, given the free wills of billions of souls, that some will reject God?  What is this “inevitable” mathematically speaking?  What percentage of the total number of souls should we expect will be saved given this inevitability?  50%?  25%?  1%?  Even given billions of souls, is a 25% salvation rate more likely than 100%?  If one flips a coin 100 times one can predict mathematically what the odds are it will be heads every time.  The odds that it will be heads 50 times are presumably much greater.  But a coin is a known quantity.  Its result is random (the random is not predictable, except in a broad statistical sense) not freely chosen.  The odds against it turning up heads 100 times out of 100 are extremely low.  If we treat free souls like flipped coins, it seems impossible that all shall be saved. But are we not, in assuming a significant number of lost souls, making a mistake in treating them like flipped coins?  Must freedom be unpredictable?  Random?  Arbitrary?

Does freedom operate according to the laws of chance?  And if not, why should all being saved be less likely than, say, half?

Why could not the perfect freedom of all guarantee the salvation of all?  What is the more likely result, and how do we know?

POSTED JULY 31, 2023

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ECKHART TOLLE AND CHRISTIAN SALVATION

What if Christian soteriology, in its concern with how to get God’s grace and be saved, has been little more than an unwitting attempt to resist that grace?

What if our strategy, unbeknownst to ourselves, has been to keep salvation somewhere beyond planet Earth and eternally in the future?  If we take the position that universal salvation is the truth, then soteriology might be, on the psychological level at least, a grandiose and perverse attempt to keep that inevitable salvation at arm’s length for as long as possible.

Reading Eckhart Tolle, one encounters repeatedly the idea that the ego, which is a false self, constantly tries to create various situations and narratives which sustain its existence.  This leads to a great deal of unnecessary drama and pain.  We are accustomed, in the religious or spiritual world, to look at ego moralistically.  But this is something Tolle does not do.  He seems to see the ego as a persistent force that causes us problems constantly, sucking the life out of us, but he views this more as a problem than a sin.

For Tolle, the ego lives on time, thrives on time, and needs some kind of narrative (and not even necessarily a self-praising one.  It can even be the opposite) to keep itself alive.  To be fully present in the now is the death of the ego, and something it militates against constantly.  The reason we spend most of our lives in the past or the future, and in ways that are not necessary or beneficial, is because the ego cannot live in the present, and must keep us distracted from it.

What would a deep-seated conviction of God’s eternal, unconditional, and irrevocable love for us mean to the ego?  It would mean the ego’s death.

Where would one find such a deep-seated conviction?  Where would one experience God’s love?  In the present, and the present only.  But to avoid this conviction of divine love (such avoidance being what the ego wants) we must limit our soteriology to the level of eschatology: the last things, some future events.  Salvation must be of the future (an uncertain future at that) and of the future only.

We look to the second coming of Christ in the future because we don’t know how to find him in the present.

We become lawyers of the Bible because we see the Bible as a book of the past and we do not know how to live now.

Take none of this to mean that the Bible is “outdated” or needs to be “made relevant”; please also note that I do assert a literal second coming of Christ, entailing a radical rebirth of the world and eventually of all people.  But if Christians spend much of their time trying to parse the book of Revelation to know exactly how and when he is coming, or if they ignore and despise the world around them because it is not ancient scripture, it may well be because they deny the Christ of the present, of the here and now.

Christ yesterday, Christ tomorrow, never Christ today.  The Christ of the Now is too frightening.  “Seek and ye shall find,” he said, but we only think we are seeking.

If only we do such-and-such then Christ, truly, will love us (in the future).  Conversely: oh look at the dear Bible and see how Christ loved us (in the past).  No Christian would deny that Christ loves us now of course, but it is one thing to assert this as a doctrine and quite another to embrace it in one’s attitudes or spiritual practice.  Alas!  Jesus loves us, but Jesus is elsewhere, waiting to come back.  We fold our hands piously and sit with woebegone faces staring at the heavens, waiting for the love to come.  Christ is always elsewhere, be it time or space.

Theologians, who have egos as much as the rest of us, must find some clever way around universalism if God’s love is to be rendered an uncertain thing and the ego left with a good toehold, at the very least, in our lives.  Hence, the torment of soteriology: is he saved?  Is she saved?  Am I saved?  How do we know?  What do we do?  Have we done it enough yet?  For if universalism is not true, or if it is only a pious “hope” that some patronizing doctrine allows us (condemning us for “dogmatism” or “presumption” if we insist that universalism is true) the ego can thrive: especially on its plans, constructions, narratives on how it will get into heaven and even how, perhaps, others will not.

It is my contention that if there is something we must do to be saved, we shall do it, somehow, sooner or later, both freely and inevitably.

The good news of our inevitable salvation in Christ is bad news for the ego.  The dramatic narrative is ruined if there is an inevitable happy ending for everyone.  How does the ego feed off the prospect of eternal bliss if everyone gets it?        

It can’t.

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“HOW CAN UNIVERSALISM BE TRUE IF…?”

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.

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UNIVERSALISM AND A CHRISTIAN LEFT

In That All Shall be Saved (Yale UP, 2019) David Bentley Hart says,

“The truth is that all of these theological degeneracies follow from an incoherence deeply fixed at the heart of almost all Christian traditions: that is, the idea that the omnipotent God of love, who creates the world from nothing, either imposes or tolerates the eternal torment of the damned.” (78)

It is one thing to argue that a just and loving God might annihilate or even torture forever some of his children.  Infernalists and universalists clearly are on opposite sides of the fence here; the issue is usually argued on the basis of reason, scripture, or both.

But what does it mean spiritually or psychologically to believe in an infernalist God?

What does it mean politically?

I think that Christian infernalists are houses divided against themselves.  As Hart asserts, probably many Christians only think they believe in hell.

But might it be that infernalism has hamstrung the church?  Might it be that laying our arguments for infernalism aside, the infernalist position sets up a God who, even if he can be justified on logical or scriptural grounds simply cannot be loved?  I believe so.  The god infernalists love (or think they love) is not lovable.  This cannot be stressed enough.  It is all very well to take a hard line on divine sovereignty and say that since God is God there are no ethical constraints above him to which he must comply.  But if what God does with this infinite right and power strikes us as abomination, how are we to love him?  We cannot.  We may proclaim that it is ourselves who are totally depraved in objecting to hell and to such a God, but whatever one makes of that argument we still cannot love the God of hellfire we claim to believe in.

If a Nobel Prize winning mathematician told you that 2+2=5 you might choose to believe he is right, even if you cannot see how.  But you have disqualified yourself from ever doing mathematics again.

And if a cruel and monstrous god is supposed to be love itself, that makes it more difficult for us to truly love ourselves or each other.  This is true in both the personal and political spheres.

So what is going on?

Why this insistence on the divine bogey, the horrific Nobodaddy?

Once one has swallowed the balderdash of infernalism, one can believe almost anything.  If an omnipotent deity wants to save everyone, but cannot because his hands, supposedly, are tied by our free will, what other social, political, economic monstrosities can be rationalized and accepted?  Feudalism, patriarchy, capitalism—one can do a song and dance and accept their necessity or even goodness if one can believe the holy, just, and loving creator of the universe will roast certain of his children over an open flame forever.

In effect, the church has corrupted itself by holding a form of moral idiocy close to its heart.  It does not help that the idiocy of infernalism has been believed by many people who are by no means idiots.  It seems that most thoroughly respected and even brilliant theologians have believed it.  The idiocy has been believed by people with loving hearts and a true desire to know Christ.

It is also notable that it tends to be the more politically and socially conservative of the church who are most likely to believe in hell and to emphasize it.  Could this situation be one of the reasons why Christianity and the Left have so often been at odds and even outright enemies?  By this I mean not only that leftists object to infernalism, but that there is something in the beliefs and attitudes behind infernalism that are inimical to the entire leftist project.

(It seems to be a common phenomenon to find people who are theologically brilliant, but politically obtuse.  Likewise, some of the most acute and perceptive political thinkers are blind or ignorant when it comes to matters of religion.)

Not that there has not always been a Christian Left, of course, but in his 2017 Protestants: The Faith that Made the Modern World (Penguin) Alec Ryrie asserts, “The real novelty of our own time is not the prominence of the religious Right but the silence of the religious Left” (7).

It is time for this Christian Left to arise.  We must tell the world that infernalism is not fundamental to the faith.

Even if one makes the case that the secular left from the 19th century onwards owes its sense of justice to Christianity, this is no reason for religious triumphalism.  What it means is that while the Church largely fumbled the ball by siding with the powerful, opposition to oppressive systems and ideologies like capitalism has been left largely to a secular Left, thereby deprived of the greater strength and spirit it might have had.

At numerous times and places the secular Left has had a stronger and more Christian ethic than the church.  I am convinced the church’s frequent hostility to the secular left comes in part from an unacknowledged moral envy the church has sometimes had when it failed to help the poor the left was in solidarity with.  Could it be the church’s ethic and spirit has been crippled by infernalism?  Could it be that a more ethically sensible Left found itself unable to cleave to a religion that demanded eternal torture for some malefactors?  I by no means advocate that Christianity should give up infernalism in order to gain more converts.  One can only justify universalism in the name of truth: whether or not that gets you more or fewer converts is not relevant.  But perhaps the secular Left has been more morally intelligent on numerous occasions.

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DOES UNIVERSALISM VIOLATE FREE WILL?

One of the defenses of infernalism is that in order for human beings to be human, to be worth something as opposed to being simply robots, we must have free will.  We cannot truly be with God unless we freely accept him.  And if our will is truly free, then it must be possible for us to reject God.  And the rejection of God must necessarily lead to damnation.  Therefore, we are told, universalism must violate free will, since it states that all shall be saved and this seems impossible if everyone is free to reject God.

Let me deal with just one element of this whole argument here.  According to the standard Christian view, we are all fit for hell to begin with.  Our own sins, or original sin inherited from Adam and Eve or something of the sort, has made it just and fitting that we be damned.

No exceptions are acknowledged here.  Simple justice, we are told, means that of all the billions of human beings existing or who ever existed they all deserve to be damned, and would be damned but for the mercy of Christ.

It seems peculiar that of the billions of humans who lived or ever will live, they all chose or will choose to sin badly enough to be damned.  For surely, to deserve such a horrible fate one must have at least freely chosen the wickedness one is damned for.

Now this is a very strange free will indeed.  Apparently, without exception, we have all freely chosen a path of sin bad enough to deserve hell.  You would think that at least a handfull would have chosen to be sinless.

But one laughs at this of course.  Sinless?  Impossible.  Even the greatest saints sin and sin seriously, as they are the first to admit.

So where is that famous free will then?  How is it that when universalism wishes to storm the gates of hell and liberate all, we are told this violates free will; but when each and every one of us is born in a world where we are inevitably doomed to freely merit damnation one hears not a peep about how our free will is violated, and that therefor God cannot tolerate the situation to exist?

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GOD’S LOVE VERSUS HELL

We are told that God loves all, but saves only some.  How is this?  Does it not take away from the faith in God’s love we might otherwise have?  The way Christianity is usually preached, a Christian might say truly, “God loves me I know, but I am still afraid.”

So what is it that is more powerful than God’s love?  “If God be for us, who can be against us?” asks Paul in Romans 8.31.  What is the enemy that threatens us with real danger of eternal death despite the power of God’s love?

It is our own “free will,” apparently, which might reject God’s grace.

And how do we know if we have done that?  Oh, the answers vary widely from those who say, “don’t worry, if you had done anything as drastic as that, you would know it” to those who say or imply that as long as we are living lives of sin, we have not accepted Christ, and are not saved.  (And how little sin do you have to commit before you are no longer living a “life of sin”?)

Thus it is that the power of a conviction of God’s love can be set at naught.

Belief that some will go to eternal hell negates the power of God’s love, stops it from being a force in our lives, relegates it to a little corner in a dark room, shaking alternately with fear and feeble hope: “yes, God loves me, but…” is its plaintive cry.

We cannot believe in God’s love strongly if we cannot believe in our inevitable salvation.  Hell hanging over our heads thwarts everything God has to give us.

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CAPITALISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF HELL

One of the many crucial points where religion and politics inextricably if not explicitly meet is in The Screwtape Letters (1942) by C.S. Lewis. Here, Screwtape, a senior devil giving instructions to a junior devil (his nephew, Wormwood) says the following:

The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that oneself is not another self. My good is my good, and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. “To be” means “to be in competition.” (Chapter 18)

C.S. Lewis did not write about politics very much, but it would be difficult not to see a connection between the philosophy of hell to the philosophy of capitalism, which, by its own admission, is all about competition.

Capitalists are not likely to put things quite so brutally as Screwtape does here—at least, not in public. What capitalism adds to this philosophy is a quaint, but ardently insisted upon frisson, which is that this competition will bring about the maximum possible good for the greatest number.

Screwtape would laugh out loud at that. One might divide capitalists into the naïve ones, who believe the frisson, and the cynical ones, who know it is rot but do not care. And I think that capitalism has mostly been cynical, rather than naïve.  As time goes by, the cynicism becomes more obvious, more brash, more contemptuous, and the naïve capitalist must turn cynic or drop the damnable capitalist ideology altogether.

Karl Marx himself, hardly a naïve individual, admitted clearly that capitalism had unleashed tremendous forces of production. But the tremendous wealth generated came at the even greater cost of human misery.

And it is one of the peculiar contradictions of capitalism that once you say a better way must be found, you are mocked for your naivete.  Apparently, anyone who opposes predatory cynicism is obliged to conceive of human beings as angels.  But capitalism, while mocking this alleged naivete, expounds a practice wherein apparently, the greatest good for the greatest number will be found by placing naked and untrammelled self-interest before all.  You may as well say that the best way to get where you want to go is to put a brick on the accelerator of your car and take your hands off the steering wheel.

Christianity is the long revolution against the zero-sum game that Screwtape proposes is built into the nature of reality.  The final triumph of Christ is the final defeat of this ideology in theory and practice.

So can Christianity still maintain its traditional doctrines about a hell of eternal torment?

I think not.  That is the Good News.  Hell is the first and last bastion of the zero-sum game.  Christians who still believe in hell as an eternity of torment or an eternity of annihilation are still clinging to the zero-sum game.  Nor can this game be defended by saying that within the traditional doctrines nobody is damned because of lack of room in heaven.  For as long as it is believed that the creation of humans must entail the risk of hell for each one of us (and that the risk was needed to make salvation meaningful) the inevitability of hell for some is built in, and therefore, so is the zero-sum game, the principle of hell.  Christ’s sacrifice becomes inadequate for salvation.  Instead, the agony of the damned becomes necessary to the bliss of the saved.  To believe in hell, therefore, is to take one’s orders from it, to be living under the same power that runs capital.