We are made for joy and love and creativity. We are embodied because the
care of the soul requires human touch and beauty, music and vision in
order to thrive. Yet we live in a broken, wounded world. Everything good
and necessary is so easily corrupted, abused, lost and wasted. We
often bear our torment within ourselves, carrying it wherever we go.
I've spent the past year or so frequently sorrowing over existence. To be honest, I'm not good at life these days. Life is as much a burden and disappointment as it is a gift. Yes, I have certain gifts that make life tolerable: Humor and poetry and laughter. And I've devoted so much of my life in the pursuit of wisdom. But most days the weather of my soul is more like Northern England and Scotland than the Appalachians. It's a kind of betrayal of the heartfelt love gifted to me by my family who hoped and prayed so passionately that I might live and have the opportunity to experience this life. And surely, they knew or know that I am different and stubborn and weirdly sensitive, a canary in the mine singing vatic songs and complaining of being misunderstood.
Some people think the Christian Gospel's claim of the "Fall" is pretty gloomy. That old "pessimistic doctrine" as one of my early theology professors called it. But they couldn't be more wrong. Assume for a moment that this is not a broken world, that history, as Hegel noted, is a slaughterboard, an empty, adventitious chronicle without providential care, without resources beyond the limits of a shrewd animal. Indeed, this is the world that people think we inhabit. If my education in psychology and physics has taught me nothing, it's that a college education these days in the West is meant to inculcate that perspective. And we order our social lives -- our leisure, labor and entertainment -- in the ways of such cold, callous logic and knowledge.
The disease that destroys the human race is and always has been spiritual. We've been reassured that there's no grand narrative when human beings are nothing without our stories. The joy of human delight is found in nothing if not in the retelling of the stories like the Fall. And that story, contrary to the way in which guys like Jonathon Edwards told it, isn't one of a spider barely suspended above the fires of hell. No, it's a story of all the dreadful wrongs in the world -- including those in every human heart -- and how God is merciful and gracious in those thin moments.
I started this long post the way I did because I don't want anyone to labor under the delusion that I'm a Christian Universalist because I have this happy-go-lucky view of humanity. I'm not trying to pull the proverbial heretical wool over anyone's eyes. My life is one of longing and failure and paralysis before powers and principalities that I despise and resist -- ineffectively. Give a man any time in the pastorate and he'll become what I am. Like Jacob, we folks wrestle with God on a daily basis. In my better days, I'd choose that path every day. But there are other days -- sometimes even quite frequent days -- when I struggle with bitterness and anguish. I walk the walk of discipleship, like Jacob, with a limp.
And too often the tradition seems to me to be a bowl of pottage. That's why, when I'm willing to sell it off, folks see me as a heretic, or, worse, traitor. Even the charitable ones are quite willing to think I deserve some saccharine indulgence -- because I'm just bending the Gospel in some optimistic (even if dangerous) ways.
But, hear me out: I don't work for Hallmark. I'm not trying to make things more beautiful than God already makes them. I'm not a mawkish romantic. The theological vision that I hold to be true I hold not because of me. I hold it because of God in Jesus Christ.
Marilyn McCord Adams in Christ and Horrors reflects upon the typical view of the Eucharist where the Eucharist is reserved for those in a perfect state of grace. One can certainly understand the desire of the medieval Church to have a higher standard of sanctity and to ask that clerics and parishioners strive for holiness. I don't condemn such aspirations. Yet surely the grace of the Eucharist, as Adams avers, is a grace for wounded souls. It's the deeply flawed, struggling, difficult soul that needs it most, not those who comfortably embrace the offer of grace.
Analogously, traditionalists often appear to offer salvation to those least in need of it. (I speak colloquially, because pastors know we are obviously all deeply in need of rescue.) In any event, I always wonder about folks like these traditionalists (who tell me that a world without anyone in hell is simply too good to believe). Like many of them, I acknowledge the value and intellectual coherence of a virtue ethics, but unlike them, I also embrace the outburst of the heart exemplified in the theological existentialist impulse of figures like Berdyaev and Shestov and Doestoevsky. Love is always ecstatic, is always renewed in wonder, even if it's subtle sweetness is sometimes lived out in a companionable domesticity that keeps in reserve the night from which the sun of love emerges. Some scholars have reduced Thomas' silence on the punishments of hell to the result of a stroke brought on by overwork and perhaps a concussion due to striking his head against a tree limb. Plausible, perhaps; I prefer to imagine his silence wrought in child-like awe before the overwhelming artistry of God's love. This, I think, may have been gifted him.
Simply put: I don't think any of us -- even the saints! -- are as pure wheat as we want to think. Hagiography may not want to bear the weight of human foible, but spend any time with the saints and you'll find them as human as the rest of us.
In seminary, I took a course with Susan Keefe called "Pastoral Ministry in the 6th-9th Centuries". Susan brilliantly had a room full of pastoral types read some hagiography of the Fathers. That's because, as Susan knew after a lifetime of reading pastoral types, the picture of grace contained in the message pastors preach is one painted large. There are no real individuals in the world, least of all the saints. Whatever life of crime we lead, we do so together.
I've suspected since then that the persistence of evil in the world -- particularly when Christians attribute it to certain folks -- is because we're more shaped by the stories of Machiavelli than of the saints. Find me someone given to Swiftian misanthropy and I'll show you a person whose moral and theological imagination has been stunted through a lack of good storytelling. Like the stories of the Fall.
When confronted with evil, we're just as apt to find a way to push it out of the world by sending it (and those responsible for it) to hell. We're not all that apt to find the evil and hell in our own hearts. Not me. I know it's there. I see it on a daily basis in myself and in the world. And I know good and well that to get rid of it, you have to heal it -- not destroy it.
This is why I don't trust folks who put so much emphasis on the human will in salvation. My will, your will, their will -- if we're all honest, that will is as corrupt at the human heart. Peel back the layers of our fallen humanity and you'll find nothing but stench and corruption. Unless, of course, that humanity includes Jesus Christ.
Become a trinitarian and watch how quickly things change. Including your picture of humanity. If Triune Being is the archetype of truly personal being, then the relational aspect of personhood is not some elective association. Rather, our relations are metaphysically an irreplaceable constituent of our unique personhood. It's more in line with a blithe modern individualism to think God will lose this or that soul in hell than it is to be in line with the traditional claim that God is Trinity and that Trinity is Love.
That Trinity, some will say, is most witnessed in the Cross. True. But not true enough. The Cross, without the Good News of Easter, is nothing more than more bad news. There is good even in our evil. And that goodness is found not because of me, but because of Jesus the Man. The Man who conquered sin, death, hell and the grave.
The Good News of Easter is the only real reason anyone would ever be a universalist.
I've spent the past year or so frequently sorrowing over existence. To be honest, I'm not good at life these days. Life is as much a burden and disappointment as it is a gift. Yes, I have certain gifts that make life tolerable: Humor and poetry and laughter. And I've devoted so much of my life in the pursuit of wisdom. But most days the weather of my soul is more like Northern England and Scotland than the Appalachians. It's a kind of betrayal of the heartfelt love gifted to me by my family who hoped and prayed so passionately that I might live and have the opportunity to experience this life. And surely, they knew or know that I am different and stubborn and weirdly sensitive, a canary in the mine singing vatic songs and complaining of being misunderstood.
Some people think the Christian Gospel's claim of the "Fall" is pretty gloomy. That old "pessimistic doctrine" as one of my early theology professors called it. But they couldn't be more wrong. Assume for a moment that this is not a broken world, that history, as Hegel noted, is a slaughterboard, an empty, adventitious chronicle without providential care, without resources beyond the limits of a shrewd animal. Indeed, this is the world that people think we inhabit. If my education in psychology and physics has taught me nothing, it's that a college education these days in the West is meant to inculcate that perspective. And we order our social lives -- our leisure, labor and entertainment -- in the ways of such cold, callous logic and knowledge.
The disease that destroys the human race is and always has been spiritual. We've been reassured that there's no grand narrative when human beings are nothing without our stories. The joy of human delight is found in nothing if not in the retelling of the stories like the Fall. And that story, contrary to the way in which guys like Jonathon Edwards told it, isn't one of a spider barely suspended above the fires of hell. No, it's a story of all the dreadful wrongs in the world -- including those in every human heart -- and how God is merciful and gracious in those thin moments.
I started this long post the way I did because I don't want anyone to labor under the delusion that I'm a Christian Universalist because I have this happy-go-lucky view of humanity. I'm not trying to pull the proverbial heretical wool over anyone's eyes. My life is one of longing and failure and paralysis before powers and principalities that I despise and resist -- ineffectively. Give a man any time in the pastorate and he'll become what I am. Like Jacob, we folks wrestle with God on a daily basis. In my better days, I'd choose that path every day. But there are other days -- sometimes even quite frequent days -- when I struggle with bitterness and anguish. I walk the walk of discipleship, like Jacob, with a limp.
And too often the tradition seems to me to be a bowl of pottage. That's why, when I'm willing to sell it off, folks see me as a heretic, or, worse, traitor. Even the charitable ones are quite willing to think I deserve some saccharine indulgence -- because I'm just bending the Gospel in some optimistic (even if dangerous) ways.
But, hear me out: I don't work for Hallmark. I'm not trying to make things more beautiful than God already makes them. I'm not a mawkish romantic. The theological vision that I hold to be true I hold not because of me. I hold it because of God in Jesus Christ.
Marilyn McCord Adams in Christ and Horrors reflects upon the typical view of the Eucharist where the Eucharist is reserved for those in a perfect state of grace. One can certainly understand the desire of the medieval Church to have a higher standard of sanctity and to ask that clerics and parishioners strive for holiness. I don't condemn such aspirations. Yet surely the grace of the Eucharist, as Adams avers, is a grace for wounded souls. It's the deeply flawed, struggling, difficult soul that needs it most, not those who comfortably embrace the offer of grace.
Analogously, traditionalists often appear to offer salvation to those least in need of it. (I speak colloquially, because pastors know we are obviously all deeply in need of rescue.) In any event, I always wonder about folks like these traditionalists (who tell me that a world without anyone in hell is simply too good to believe). Like many of them, I acknowledge the value and intellectual coherence of a virtue ethics, but unlike them, I also embrace the outburst of the heart exemplified in the theological existentialist impulse of figures like Berdyaev and Shestov and Doestoevsky. Love is always ecstatic, is always renewed in wonder, even if it's subtle sweetness is sometimes lived out in a companionable domesticity that keeps in reserve the night from which the sun of love emerges. Some scholars have reduced Thomas' silence on the punishments of hell to the result of a stroke brought on by overwork and perhaps a concussion due to striking his head against a tree limb. Plausible, perhaps; I prefer to imagine his silence wrought in child-like awe before the overwhelming artistry of God's love. This, I think, may have been gifted him.
Simply put: I don't think any of us -- even the saints! -- are as pure wheat as we want to think. Hagiography may not want to bear the weight of human foible, but spend any time with the saints and you'll find them as human as the rest of us.
In seminary, I took a course with Susan Keefe called "Pastoral Ministry in the 6th-9th Centuries". Susan brilliantly had a room full of pastoral types read some hagiography of the Fathers. That's because, as Susan knew after a lifetime of reading pastoral types, the picture of grace contained in the message pastors preach is one painted large. There are no real individuals in the world, least of all the saints. Whatever life of crime we lead, we do so together.
I've suspected since then that the persistence of evil in the world -- particularly when Christians attribute it to certain folks -- is because we're more shaped by the stories of Machiavelli than of the saints. Find me someone given to Swiftian misanthropy and I'll show you a person whose moral and theological imagination has been stunted through a lack of good storytelling. Like the stories of the Fall.
When confronted with evil, we're just as apt to find a way to push it out of the world by sending it (and those responsible for it) to hell. We're not all that apt to find the evil and hell in our own hearts. Not me. I know it's there. I see it on a daily basis in myself and in the world. And I know good and well that to get rid of it, you have to heal it -- not destroy it.
This is why I don't trust folks who put so much emphasis on the human will in salvation. My will, your will, their will -- if we're all honest, that will is as corrupt at the human heart. Peel back the layers of our fallen humanity and you'll find nothing but stench and corruption. Unless, of course, that humanity includes Jesus Christ.
Become a trinitarian and watch how quickly things change. Including your picture of humanity. If Triune Being is the archetype of truly personal being, then the relational aspect of personhood is not some elective association. Rather, our relations are metaphysically an irreplaceable constituent of our unique personhood. It's more in line with a blithe modern individualism to think God will lose this or that soul in hell than it is to be in line with the traditional claim that God is Trinity and that Trinity is Love.
That Trinity, some will say, is most witnessed in the Cross. True. But not true enough. The Cross, without the Good News of Easter, is nothing more than more bad news. There is good even in our evil. And that goodness is found not because of me, but because of Jesus the Man. The Man who conquered sin, death, hell and the grave.
The Good News of Easter is the only real reason anyone would ever be a universalist.