easter

Is Free Will an Argument Against Universal Salvation?

Gideon Yutzy3 Comments

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.

Recognizing the Resurrected Jesus

Gideon Yutzy1 Comment

From out of nowhere, spring is emerging. This time around it comes lockstep with an unveiling that I feel taking place in the musty recesses of my own wintry heart. To mix two curious metaphors from the Gospel of Luke, although I often kick against the pricks, God is removing scales from my eyes. Some of the most mundane things are now appearing in a new light. I give thanks because I know vernal breakthroughs, both in the heart and in the soil, come through unalloyed grace.

In a few days our pastor boards an early morning flight from Dublin, bound for his native Sierra Leone. It is reported that he won’t return until August. In his absence I have been asked to preach several of the Sunday morning sermons. Checking the lectionary, I take down my first text: Luke 24: 36-48. This will be two weeks after Easter Sunday so Jesus has already well and truly risen. “Peace be with you,” says Jesus, it is the broiled fish passage. Feverishly, I take down several notes. I hope that’ll preach, I mutter and add several more.

In further reading, I learn that the resurrected Jesus is mistaken for three different people. Mary Magdalene, the first ever witness to the resurrection (but certainly not the last), thought him a gardener. Later, the disciples took Jesus for a fellow fisherman hollering advice at them for how to remedy a fruitless night of fishing. And finally, two unnamed disciples thought he was just another random bloke traveling to Emmaus.

This insight captures my imagination and I decide to craft my sermon around it. When the resurrected Jesus appears he is devastatingly intimate and as local as a lemonade stand; a gardener, a fisherman, a dusty traveler. Yet he is also mysterious, unrecognizable at first, even among his closest associates.

Imagine the most universal and all-encompassing being you can think of and Jesus is more universal. Now imagine a person who spends their entire life in the same tiny neighbourhood and Jesus is more local, more embodied, more rooted in the particular.

Stepping into the shower to kick off my weekend, I remember lines from a popular Mennonite hymn: I thank thee too that thou hast made our joys abound/that in the darkest spot of earth some love is found. It occurs to me that the resurrected Jesus, hard as it is to recognize him and pin him down, is that joy in the darkest spot of earth. He descended into hell, he ascended into heaven…

Today, post-resurrection, Jesus is manifested not only in the gardener, the fisherman and the traveler, but also in the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. If I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there. Nothing remains untouched by the cosmic Easter event. The divine has been irrevocably mixed with the human and now there is no turning back. The ship has sailed, the genie has been let out of the bottle, the cat let out of the bag, our messiah out of his tomb.

The Christ who transcends time and space comes to each of us differently, yet there is one commonality in each resurrection appearance: he knows us, changes us, heals us, and makes us whole people.

To me that is the meaning of Easter. I think it just might preach.