On several occasions, I’ve met people who recognize the elegance of a Gospel that saves all, but they stop short of embracing it because they think it turns us into robots. To them, a soteriology of universal restoration smacks of God saving people whether they like it or not.
Fair enough, and it’s not the worst argument. They don’t want anything shoved down their throats. I get that.
But part of me also wonders whether they are more affected by a rugged Western individualism than they might realize. If I see myself primarily as an individual, then yes, my salvation comes down to my choices and decisions. However, if I see my identity as woven in and through community (nobody is an island), then it starts to make sense that salvation is a project aimed at the human race rather than individual people.
What, after all, is the essence of a human? Is it our physical body? Hardly. The cells in our bodies change completely every seven years. That’s not to mention the speedy decay and ultimate decomposition of our bodies after we die.
Is it our achievements? Is it our memories? Our experiences? That might be getting closer. In truth, most of us probably attach our identity to non-physical markers such as these.
And that’s where it gets interesting: these markers are all intertwined with other people. Take memories and experiences. If we remove even one person involved with our memories and experiences and consign them to eternal damnation, our identity falls apart.
In other words, we can go ahead and remove people from the picture because they failed to make the heroic act of free will and assent to God’s offer of salvation. But our own identity will be fundamentally altered because of it.
Would we rather enter eternal bliss as robots, or as truncated, lobotomized versions of ourselves?
“That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth” (Philippians 2:10). “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Corinthians 15:22). Adam and Eve’s race is saved–or doomed–as one.
Yes, we have free will. Yes, we should make good decisions. Yes, our actions here have a profound impact on our trajectory. But there is a danger of overemphasizing these truths. We also desperately need God’s grace. As much as we want to will what is good, we find that our will is impoverished. Sick. Broken. Our very will is in need of divine intervention, in need of healing.
“Batter my heart, three-person’d God… Take me to you, imprison me.” That’s not New Age fluff, that’s John Donne writing four centuries ago.
Donne understood that if he was to be saved, it had to be the work of God, not the result of his heroic free will. And upon even a moment of cursory reflection, surely we must reach the same conclusion: the entire human race is saved by grace. (Unless, of course, we’re to go full Calvinist and say God will batter the hearts of some but not others, although poor Calvin probably said it with much more sophistication than we give him credit for.)
This Easter, it is good and right to celebrate God’s resurrection power in my life. Salvation is personal. Jesus loves me, this I know.
But it is far more glorious to consider Easter as a harbinger of salvation for all, as extending far beyond the vaguely-defined contours of my puny self to an entire human race and indeed the cosmos.
The version of universal salvation that makes the most sense to me is premised on the eternal nature of God’s mercy. This mercy, because it is endures forever (see Psalm 136), will outlast the individual’s ability to resist him. One can resist for a trillion years, but a trillion–or even TREE(3), my kids’ favorite number–is still not forever. I don’t see how such a patient, persistent, even painful love would violate free will and turn us into robots any more than a parent’s love for a rebellious child who disdains that love.
The only question is whether there is a point of no return, where God’s love and respect for our individual dignity compels him to give us over to the eternal destruction (unbecoming) we have freely chosen. This argument still has some purchase for me, both for biblical and philosophical reasons. But it might be too rooted in the individualism you’re challenging here.
Dear Josh,
Thank you for your comment. The ‘point of no return’ possibility is quite a strong argument, and it’s a sobering thought. More than once, it’s motivated me to abandon certain habits and modes of showing up in my world.
For instance, I, like so many of my species, can be self-centred and ignore others. But I know at some stage it starts to catch up with us. Self-centredness starts to become our identity, part of who we are at our core. It becomes harder and harder to change and focus on the needs and dramas of our neighbour. Yet where does the original impulse come from to stop being such a selfish prick and instead, just once, notice others? I think it’s grace. And can we really resist unmitigated grace when we encounter it face to face? And why would some accept it and not others? Is it because they’re good little boys and girls and the other kids aren’t? This is where I sometimes think Calvin’s intuition was correct–irresistible grace. Perhaps he just didn’t take it far enough, perhaps it’s irresistible grace for all. I also think, when I read Jesus in the Gospels, that he thought religious, churchy people are in more danger of resisting grace than people doing the ‘hot sins.’ I know that’s a trendy thing to say, but it really does seem that way.
God help us. Being human isn’t something any of us asked for, but we shall bear the mantle as well as we can.
Save from what exactly? If you mean the dying but well the party-line God seems pretty effective at that for the first 70 yrs, but really struggles after 100. We can talk about a next life but then things get a bit more speculative. Save us from being tortured to death constantly for eternity, for crimes historically designated by the church that some people might think are not equal eg. murder and masturbation? What kind of God would create a being knowing that that being would break the God’s rules and then torture that being to death forever? An evil one, which is why the early Jesus movement believed Jesus came to reveal not the evil creator God but the hidden God who was not such a walking trashcan.
I don’t want to be rude, but this whole discussion reminds me of medieval debates about whether if you were decapitated in this life your head would be attached or detached upon resurrection. That is, ridiculous.
I don’t feel like there is free will, I feel like some giant pushed me down the waterslide and walked away laughing.
There is nearly no such thing as an individual human. Maybe severely autistic people. Even then though, they tend to react better when your the teacher that untied them from the chair than the teacher who needlessly bound them. Genetics is huge and environment is huge. Would those German boys who as part of a cold war era (70s?) experimental program in Berlin were removed from their purportedly inadequate mothers and knowingly placed with convicted male on male child sex offender carers have been very different adults if the authorities had not done that? For some strange reason I think they’d have done better with mom even if she has a weakness for the wine bottle and the muscly German man. But that’s the point, your God, Yaldabaoth, is always stalking this material world looking for the next child to destroy.
It matters. There’s the endless who have taken both barrel shots to the face – they don’t need to be told their loving father did that, since the obvious conclusion to that is “well if he did this to me, that must mean I am as bad as my less heavenly father always told me”.