Welcome to Living in the Matrix.
I'm Jonathan and I'm left of center.
And I'm Rich and I tend to lean a little bit more to the right.
But the bottom line is, is together we try to look for the balance of what it means to
be human in today's world.
All right.
Welcome everybody.
Living in the Matrix.
I'm Jonathan.
This is my co host Rich.
Say hello, Rich.
Hey everybody.
Great to be here.
And my goodness, this is number three this week.
So they say three is a charm, David.
Let's go.
It's going to be a good one.
I guarantee you today is going to be a fantastic one.
So today we have David Congdon and David has written a book on the four views of Christian
universalism, which we love diving into the show because I think this is probably one
of the, as I was saying to David earlier, hell is probably one of the most important
subjects to deconstruct because when you do, it can radically change the way you look at
Christianity and give it a life that you didn't realize was actually there.
So welcome David.
It is a pleasure to have you.
Thanks so much for having me.
It's great to be here.
Absolutely.
So let's dive in and why don't you give our audience sort of a quick summary of your book
encapsulated because there's sort of four parts help us understand it at a high level.
Well, the book is a volume of multi, it's a multi view volume.
So I'm not the only person who has a perspective in this book.
There are three others who are also in the volume.
I am sort of the moderator of the conversation, but I'm also a contributor to the four views.
I have one of the four in the book.
And you know, the goal of the book is just to help people understand that universalism
is not a single thing.
It's a there's a range of views and ideas under the broad umbrella of Christian universalism.
So the book in that sense is helping is trying to help people to complicate the conversation,
to diversify how we talk about this issue, not to assume that if you have one knockdown
argument against one position that that somehow eradicates the whole conversation, you know,
that universalism is now out.
So the four views in the book, briefly, just I'll just name them.
One is on a early Christian or patristic universalism.
So this is a universalism that you might find in earlier early church period.
Another one is an evangelical universalism, one that was more congenial to contemporary
American evangelicals.
Another one is what we call a post Bardian universalism.
So for those who don't know who Carl Bard is, he's a prominent Swiss theologian in the
20th century.
His view is important for that that chapter.
And then there's my own view, which I'm broadly calling existential universalism.
It's certainly the most out there in terms of the conversation, but it's trying to show
you can.
There's all types can be included in this conversation.
Yeah.
So just so I know, as we talk about that, do you buy in hook line and sinker on your
view or is it sort of what you're wrestling with?
I mean, I'm hook line and sinker in the sense of if we're going to have some kind of Christian
theology, it had better be universalist.
But I think I'm open to articulate in that in a variety of ways.
I don't think presenting is an argument.
It is an argument.
Right.
Well, I think the spirit of the book is to say you don't have to accept my position for
me to view you as like in the right.
It's just an idea I'm proposing to maybe help to help people think about things a little
more carefully and critically.
Yeah.
The reason why I act.
Yeah.
Quick, quick, quick.
The reason why I ask is I want to make sure I understand the position that you're holding
right now because I hold my understanding of my faith very lightly.
I can let go any part if I get introduced to new evidence that is all I have one rule
has to be consistent with love.
That's it.
And what I find is it that always places me in a wrestling.
And I want to know how hard you hold on to it because I love this conversation.
Yeah, because I want to I want to be totally open to new ideas here.
I mean, I'm very open to new ideas.
I don't hold my own position as being it has to be right.
My own views have changed radically over the years.
You know, and I'm it's an ongoing process.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Rich, you had a question?
Yeah.
The thing I was going to mention is, well, even David Artman in his book, Graves Saves
All, I mean, even has an example of the early church fathers as a summary of ways, right?
Here's scripture, there's tradition, there's early church fathers.
There's almost like God is a loving father, right?
And so we've got this almost character defense that even C.S. Lewis would say, listen, if
there's a passage in the Bible that differs with the character of God, I go with the character
of God, etc.
Right.
The other thing I wanted to I'm really excited about is, you know, well, I want you to be
aware that our audience primarily isn't really deeply theological.
So in your interview with your podcast host, you talked about there's not a process theology
version of of of universalism, if you would.
And we none of our folks know what the dipolar kind of aspects of God are, nor would they
know what DBH means by default, right?
If you throw out, you know, you know, I told him, OK, cool.
Yeah.
So I realized that our audience is open.
We've seen a lot of cool things.
And our stuff has ranged from talking about theology and evangelicalism and universalism
to ways to heal yourself through fasting and meditation and ice baths and and a lot of
other kinds of constructs.
Right.
So understand that it's a pretty general audience.
But I think that the general that the temper of where we're going with this is going to
be huge for people just to add another benefit, another thing.
Right.
So that's all I wanted to throw out there.
Thanks so much.
That's great.
Absolutely.
You know, that's a really good point, Rich, is that we don't treat this like a podcast.
In other words, we're trying to communicate information to people.
We treat it as a conversation because our goal is to find people who are having fascinating
conversations and have them with them.
And I think this this this idea has so much rich value.
And I love talking about it because I think it's life giving.
So I'll ask this first, because you have a unique story that I know.
What is your background?
Because you got to a point where you wrote this book, which is on the edges.
How did you get there?
Because I know you came from a pretty famous school.
Yes.
So I grew up deep in the heart of American evangelicalism.
As I mentioned earlier, I mean, I am descended from the founder of Wheaton College.
So Wheaton College is deep in my in my family, in my history.
I grew up going to my grandparents house down the road from where I went from where I grew
up and on my grandparents wall is a picture of Jonathan Blanchard, the founder of Wheaton
College and the picture of Wheaton in 1860, the original building.
And I'm a sixth generation Wheaton grad.
So my father is named Jonathan Blanchard Congdon.
So it's all you know, it's deep in there.
Right.
So growing up, I heard about all the time I heard about the origins of kind of contemporary
evangelicalism constantly.
My whole family is a family of pastors and missionaries.
You know, so my grandfather was a professor of Bible and theology for 30 years.
So it's it's it's the world in which I was raised.
It's the air that I was breathing from from childhood.
And so naturally, of course, I went to Wheaton and I went there as a outspoken fundamentalist.
I called myself a fundamentalist to my roommate and my friends there.
Who are your influences at that point?
Who are your influences at that?
Right going into Wheaton?
I mean, to be honest, it was just my own family.
If I'm funny, you know, I didn't I wasn't trained theologically as a child.
My parents were not, you know, intellectual types who were going to be, you know, feeding
me theology and philosophy from a young age.
I had a normal childhood.
I came to college to study English literature.
I wanted to, you know, I was an English major.
I wanted to study poetry.
I was a poet.
That's what I wanted to do.
It but there's no money in poetry, though.
There's no money in poetry.
No, there's not.
So I didn't care about the nuances of biblical interpretation, theological history, all that
stuff was completely irrelevant to me.
I actually didn't even know when I went to college, when I went to Wheaton, that Christians
could be baptized as an infant.
I didn't realize that was a thing that you did.
You know, to me, that was like something that, you know, those pagan Catholics did, you know,
right?
Like it was completely outside of my realm of experience.
So I was utterly ignorant of theological history, church history, knew none of it.
But I did know that whatever my family believed was right.
You know, I knew that.
And I knew that they were, you know, pre-millennial dispensationalists.
Those are big money words in evangelicalism.
I didn't know the nuances of those words.
I didn't know the details of those theories, but I knew that it was right because my grandfather
believed it.
My father believed it.
My parents believed that that was the position.
So I had to be right.
But I remember very vividly the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college,
I picked up a copy of Mark Knoll's book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.
If you don't know that book, it was a very important landmark book in the 90s that came
out.
And Knoll's book, when I read it the first time through that summer, I quite literally
threw it across the room.
You know, I smashed it against the wall of my parents' house and was just furious that
this person, who I respected because he was a professor at Wheaton College, was saying
such obviously heretical things.
And I picked the book up again about a month later towards the end of summer, read it again,
and kind of had a conversion experience.
You know, realized that maybe he's right.
Maybe evangelicals don't have the totality of truth in their grasp.
Maybe they aren't the only right theology or position to hold.
And I went into my second year at Wheaton College with a readiness to relearn everything
from the ground up.
So I just said, I'll set aside everything that I've been taught and I'll just learn
to refresh.
Did you talk to your family about that?
That's kind of a, hey, I'm kind of leading the fold a little bit.
Yeah, that's a big deal.
Did you talk to your family or did you keep it private?
I did talk to my family.
You know, I had already, you know, my first semester at Wheaton College, I had a philosophy
professor who really changed my life and he had me read Augustine's Confessions for the
first time.
I didn't encounter Augustine.
I had no idea who he was.
You know, and I read Confessions and it blew my mind.
You know, it absolutely rocked my world.
And I remember calling home to my parents and saying, hey, Dad, Mom, I read Augustine's
Confessions, you know, and it was incredible.
And I remember my dad telling me on the phone, he's like, you liked your philosophy class?
I hate it.
You know, he's like, okay, you know, if you like that stuff, go ahead, read it.
You know, he didn't care.
You know, my parents didn't care.
They just, they would encourage me to read whatever I found interesting.
They had no, they couldn't comprehend why I found that interesting, but they knew that
if I was interested in it, it was okay, because they were very supportive parents.
They were always wanting me to pursue whatever I was interested in at the moment.
And so they didn't care about whether or not I was toeing the theological line of the family.
That wasn't their concern.
You felt the freedom to explore?
Absolutely.
That's awesome.
Yeah.
That's a question.
Yeah.
Quick question regarding the Confessions, because it blew my mind.
Because a lot of people love C.S. Lewis than they don't in the evangelical framework, right?
Theistic evolution.
A lot of people love Augustine in some regards, but I'm reading this passage that says Augustine's
on his deathbed.
His mother says, don't baptize him because if he goes back to his lecherous ways after
he gets baptized, what good is that going to do?
Right?
He's going to be baptized for the mission of sins, including him praying for his dead
mother so that Satan wouldn't guile him and take him off to his.
And I'm like, whoa, we've got purgatory or salvation after some kind of things happening
here.
Were those kinds of things kind of tickling your fancy?
And maybe was there anything else about Mark Knoll's book that kind of started saying,
it looks like there's reasonable people, especially Augustine, who are saying things that, wait
a minute, I've got to take a pause here.
Well, the combination for me was the fact that Knoll's book was showing how, and he
goes through different areas of evangelical thought, like creationism is a big part of
the book, which was the part that really rocked me.
That grew up as a young earth creationist.
But what Knoll's showing that each of these areas in evangelical thought are only maybe
50, 60, 70 years old, that they're at most be a hundred years old.
So we're talking about a tiny sliver of Christian history in which these ideas had sprung up.
And so for me, the hard thing for me to grasp was that everything I had believed from childhood
was rested on a foundation of just mere decades of time and had, you know, it was the shakiest
of foundations upon which to base myself intellectually.
And so that combined with reading an ancient Christian theologian like Augustine, who I
found deeply fascinating and thoughtful and profound and just a beautiful writer, the
combination of those two things was earth shattering to me because here on the one hand
was how shallow and superficial my thought process was or what I had believed was.
And here's an ancient theologian who was deep and profound and really wrestling with things
that were at a whole other level than from what I was, what I had been thinking about
or believing.
And so the combination of that was what really, you know, had forced me to open my mind to
what else was out there.
So I've never read Confessions.
I should.
It's a great book.
I want you.
Yeah, you're making it sound amazing.
What is it out to you?
Because you guys have both read it.
What stood out to you about it?
Honesty, just absolute.
Almost like just coming down.
I mean, I think he was in tears.
He was wrestling with something and there's a sign there's a scene where he somehow has
a sign to open the Book of Romans, I think.
But I mean, there's a lot of different things in there.
But if you actually look at it, you're looking into his heart of what's going on and what's
breaking him and what's getting him, what's questioning about things in real life kinds
of scenarios.
It's a confession.
And the reason why people love it is because I think when he wrote it, it is not written.
It's with intentionality.
You know how we talk about these things as you manifest, as you intentionally create
love into the work you do or the food you make for your family or the music you play
in this particular book.
The things that he wrote were so real, so almost tearful, almost the humanity of him
just comes through shining in my mind.
That's what was so powerful and brilliant too at the same time.
Go ahead, David.
I mean, yeah, I agree with that.
I think for me, I was just basically blown away by reading a work of theology for the
first time.
I mean, that was for me, I think it was my first experience reading a real work of theological
depth.
Right.
And having not encountered anything like that, I'm encountering this thoughtful doctrinal
reflection in a very personal, a pious mode.
It's almost an act of worship in many ways.
The book is very, he's constantly praying to God in between his reflections.
And those reflections are deeply thoughtful issues of creation, issues of time and eternity,
issues of sin and salvation.
He's wrestling with these basic questions of theology.
And I had never encountered, I never read anything wrestling with those kinds of doctrines
before.
And so for me, it was just realizing, oh, people have put serious thought into these
ideas.
The question of time and eternity, for instance, I had never read anything that was wrestling
with that question before.
And I never thought about, oh, maybe my superficial idea about eternity is not...
I could spend a lifetime unpacking just one chapter of that book and just coming to grips
with that was a humbling experience.
So what happened after that in terms of your growth, where did that lead you?
Well, pretty quickly, as you can imagine, it led me to unravel some of my beliefs.
And I went in a process of...
What was the first to go?
Probably my Young Earth Creationism.
That's a pretty easy one to let go of, but that was the first thing that went.
And that was tough though, because my dad was a very strong believer at that time.
I used to go to Young Earth Creation meetings in my hometown growing up as a kid.
So it was deep.
That was deep in the water for me.
But that went pretty quickly because of Noel's book.
I started dipping my toes into theology at that point.
I started taking classes, took a systematic theology class at Wheaton College the next
year.
And that was opening my eyes to a whole realm of work that I had never encountered before,
including Karl Barth.
We read Barth in that class and some other people.
But I was also struck by these poets that I was reading.
So I was still an English major and I was still reading a lot of poetry.
And I was taking a lot of courses from Professor Roger Lundin, who passed away a while back.
But he was my mentor and he was a beloved mentor of mine.
I just really changed my life.
But what he did was he did theology in some ways through literature and exploring theological
themes and through the books he was reading.
And so I wrote some papers under his guidance and some other people's guidance.
I did a paper on T.S. Eliot and theology and prophecy that really was important for me.
I did a piece on Czesław Miewoś, the Polish poet, looking at him and eschatology and narcissism.
And so at that point, I was just dabbling in ideas.
I had no idea what it was.
I was out of my depth.
I wasn't prepared to really deal with those topics, but I was excited by them.
I was thrilled to be reading these theological ideas.
And so Professor Lundin recommended that I go to study at Princeton Seminary to do my
MDiv there.
His goal for me was I would do the MDiv, learn theology, then do a PhD in literature and
basically do what he was doing, but in my own way, kind of combining literature and
theology.
And I still, there was a part of me that still wishes I had done that.
But when I was at Princeton, I sort of fell in love with that topic and realized that
was really speaking to me in a way that literature wasn't at that time.
And so I really wanted to-
Good question.
Didn't Andrew Ronich go to Princeton?
Do you know Andrew Ronich?
I think he did.
Do you know that name?
He's written a book on universalism.
It's a massive, massive book.
Yeah.
And David Artman recommended him on our podcast after we chatted with David.
So you're familiar with obviously David Artman.
Yes.
Yeah.
Very good.
Sorry about that interjection.
But I was thinking the same, I was in the same universe there.
David, did you want to be a writer or a teacher or an editor?
What'd you want to do with that?
I mean, so from the age of 11, I knew I wanted to get my PhD and be a professor of some kind.
That was my life goal from the age of 11.
Did you see yourself in the writing?
I mean, I think growing up, you probably do.
I did, just because that was my family school.
But by the time I left Wheaton, I no longer felt at home there.
Yeah, that's the question I was going to ask you.
Did this feel like curiosity or a deconstruction?
Oh, deconstruction for sure.
Really?
Absolutely.
Oh, yes.
Being in your family lineage, how did you feel suddenly being that far away from where
your family believed?
Well, I mean, I'm also-
Where the journey leads you in the middle of nowhere.
You know?
You're the only one in this room.
I have a combative personality at times when it comes to intellectual ideas, especially
at that time I did.
And I remember writing a letter to all of my aunt and uncles announcing my distancing
from them.
And that was a big deal.
So my father was one of 12.
So it's a big family.
And so I wrote this letter to all of them saying, you know, I'm not on board, basically.
And a couple of them were like, you know, great, do your thing.
Other people were like, I'm very sad to hear that, you know, kind of typical thing.
But you know, it was that was that was OK.
I mean, I think at that time, at that time, it was still early stages.
You know, so it was like, oh, you know, he's just, you know, different a little bit.
I remember when I was graduating from Wheaton College, my first cousin was also there.
He and I were same year at Wheaton.
He's Doug and I'm David.
So we were next to each other in line in the graduation line.
And I remember, you know, talking to with my you know, we were talking with our our
our grandparents, our grandparents afterwards.
And I at that point had already gotten my letter to go to Princeton Seminary.
My cousin was going to go to Dallas Seminary, Dallas Electrical Seminary, two polar opposite
schools.
Biggest differences.
Yeah.
My grandfather went to Dallas.
Many of my uncles went to Dallas.
Dallas is sort of a family school for us in a different sense.
And so I remember my grandmother coming up to me afterward at some point after my after
graduation and saying, you know, there's still time to go to Dallas.
There's still time to like to redeem yourself.
And my cousin, Doug, when we were standing in line and graduation, he's like, you know,
Princeton needs some Christians.
It's good thing you're going there.
You know, there was a sense like, you know, like you're going into the dark side, you're
going to the you're going to them, you know, to to to the to the world of the pagans and
the liberals and the heathens.
And but but, you know, you know, at that point, it was sort of like, oh, maybe we're losing
David.
You know, maybe David's lost to us.
And at that point, I was I was fine with that.
I knew that I needed to, you know, venture out into a new world of thought.
I couldn't stay wrapped up in just what I'd always heard and what I'd always believed.
And and I was ready to do just to blow open the doors and just, you know.
Trot my own path away from my family, which is fine.
But what did you feel like for you?
For me, liberation, you know, for me, it was I mean, I was always intellectually curious.
And so for me, the deconstruction was a chance to explore.
It was like it was playtime.
You know, it was ready for me.
It was playground.
Like, did you go all the way and say anything in the world or was it sort of still within
the frame of Christianity?
Because I never lost any disconnect to Jesus ever.
I learned so much from Buddhism and Hinduism and Zoroastrianism.
All of them I've learned from.
What was your frame?
At that time, I was still operating within the realm of Christianity, certainly.
And I think even at that stage, still a fairly narrow conversation.
It hadn't blown that far open yet, but I was open to it.
I was ready for it.
You know, I was I was prepared to go wherever it led me.
But but I do.
So but here's the but the thing is, like I was one of the first things I was ready to
to go over on to change my mind on was on universalism because I so when I started at
Princeton Seminary in 2005, that fall, I began a blog or that year I began a blog called
the Fire and the Rose, which I did for a number of years.
And one of the first things I did my first semester at Princeton Seminary was start a
blog series called Why I Am Why I Am a Universalist.
And so this is 2005 and 2006.
So it was it was a long blog series.
You know, what kind of went on and on.
It was like it was essentially a systematic theology that I was writing in the form of
a of a conversation about universalism, but in the mode of me kind of announcing to the
world, I'm a universalist.
All right.
And so kind of the next step, the next stage of my theological journey was just me saying
here's where I am theologically.
I'm definitely no longer with with my evangelical family and where I was.
And was that for you to make that intellectual?
I was just going to say this because you talked about this new playground, David.
People go through deconstruction and get devastated, suicidal, depressed.
We had a guest on who was a Mormon who went theist and then full blown nihilistic.
And now she's kind of trying to settle on a positive side of atheism where she's offering
spiritual advice.
A lot of people you can hear post-Christian.
I mean, you're talking about a playground and a casting aside that the weights that
have left you being free is almost oh, my God, let's go, baby, as opposed to mama, help
me.
I'm despondent.
I need a therapy, et cetera, et cetera.
Help us understand that transition.
Yeah, I never.
Because you're from the Wheaton family, brother.
Come on.
Yes, it's true.
I think I'm lucky.
I'm lucky because I one grew up with a very healthy family life with parents who are very
supportive of me.
I didn't have any of the toxic baggage of feeling like I was a worthless person.
Or being made to feel like I was a terrible person that needed religion, needed this specific
form of Christianity in order to be loved by God.
I never had any of that.
That was never part of my world.
So even though I called myself a fundamentalist, I didn't have the stereotypical fundamentalist
experience with religion and with Christianity.
For me, it was always an intellectual experience and an intellectual journey of curiosity.
When I was eight or nine years old, I used to take copious sermon notes on my church
flyer, Bulletin, because I wanted to and then I would talk to the pastor afterwards and
I'd grill him on his sermon to understand, what exactly did you mean by this passage
here?
Are you sure that's the right interpretation of that verse?
I was doing that from an early age.
It got to one point where my parents actually forced me to go to the children's school,
the children's church so that I wouldn't pester the pastor with questions and ask him too
many questions afterwards about the sermon.
That was just my personality.
So for me, theology and doctrine wasn't something about my worth as a person.
My worth wasn't at stake.
You have an amazing amount of freedom.
It's awesome.
Yeah, absolutely.
Total freedom with supportive parents.
For me, deconstruction was like, oh, I guess I'm just going to discover new things in the
world.
Yay, this is great.
There was none of the psychological damage that I had to work through.
Are you familiar with R.C.
Sproul?
Oh, sure.
Yeah, yeah.
So I don't know if you knew there was a huge debate.
I mean, R.C.
Sproul and John Piper were good friends, but the sad truth of the matter is, as a Pato
Baptist, he wouldn't have ever been allowed to take communion at Bethlehem Baptist.
And so there is that side of things.
And I get the feeling that your family is the kind of people who would look at that
and say, my God, aren't they not brothers in Christ in here?
Or would they actually put them?
My parents certainly would be, yes.
They would not understand why that was such a big deal.
That being said, though, the extended family absolutely would.
And my grandfather and my father would come to near blows over creationism issues.
And there's a lot of animosity there among family members, lots of fighting over these
issues between my uncles, my uncles who were pastors or missionaries and were really deeply
invested in the theological rightness of their beliefs.
They definitely had a lot going on in terms of fighting with other people about these
issues.
My grandfather was a very cantankerous, argumentative person.
And when my aunt and uncle, so his daughter and her husband, when they left to join the
Roman Catholic Church, that happened when I was in high school.
My grandfather wrote his daughter a letter saying, you're on the road to hell.
And that was just what you did.
So I never understood that way of thinking or that attitude of holding their doctrines.
I remember when I went to Wheaton, my aunt and uncle who were Catholic lived nearby and
I would go visit them because I told them, I support you and I think it's important that
we embrace a wide spectrum of beliefs and ideas.
And even if I don't subscribe to Catholicism, I respect your beliefs.
And so I'm still friends with them and I'm closest with them in my family.
And so yes, I was sort of at a unique place within my larger family landscape.
I had a really unique experience and I'm grateful that my parents weren't invested in these
issues because it might have changed my trajectory.
No, it's solid.
So I want to get to the book because I want to dive in and I want to answer one question
first.
What was the story leading up to writing this book?
It's a unique idea.
Well so the book sounds like it's a passion.
In a way it is.
I mean, I've written a lot on this topic now.
I say that because you said it was the most meaningful.
It was.
Yeah.
Well, so the story here is I published a book in 2016 called The God Who Saves and that
book was my first full length entry into the question of universalism.
That book, I really poured my heart into that book.
It's definitely more academic than I would like it to be.
I had a lot of people ask me to write more of a layman's version of it, but it's a full
scale systematic theology around universalism.
The book got me fired from my job because I was working for a Christian organization
that had a statement of faith.
So universalism they viewed as being outside the bounds and so I lost my job there.
That's why I'm here now in the Kansas City area where I work at KU now.
The issue of universalism, while it's very personal to me, it's personal in a lot of
different ways.
In one sense, I care about the topic because I do think that without universalism of some
kind, the God that we believe in is indistinguishable from a devil in my view.
So there's something, some version of it I think has to be right.
But also it's personal to me just because it's changed my life in both positive and
negative ways.
The God Who Saves and my blog series from a decade earlier were both really important
for me.
They were both personal journeys of intellectual and theological spiritual exploration.
They got me a lot of attention.
I did a lot of speaking on this topic and it was really meaningful, but I also lost
my job and had to uproot my family.
So it was painful as well.
So anyway, I…
You've heard the price.
I think that's an important moment.
I did, yeah.
You paid the price for this.
It wasn't like it was some easy ride that you could ride on the coattails of your family.
You had to earn it.
Yeah, which is why I dedicate this book, the dedication reads, for all those who have proclaimed
a wider hope, even at the expense of their own livelihood.
That's awesome.
There are a number of people who have done that.
So I put together this book proposal while I was still working at my previous job and
I pitched it to them initially to see if they would publish it.
They passed on it for very obvious reasons.
For our audience, what's the title, David?
Well, the current title is Varieties of Christian Universalism Exploring Four Views.
I should say that when I first pitched the book, it was going to be more of a multi-view
book about universalism that would include anti-universalist positions as well.
So it was going to be a full dialogue between the pro and the con.
Yeah.
And so the book was accepted at Baker.
Baker agreed to publish it, but then I lost my job.
And then a couple of people who had agreed to write for the book no longer wanted to
be associated with me or didn't want to be involved in the project for various reasons.
And so I lost a couple of chapters from the book and kind of had to reconstruct what the
book was going to be.
I wasn't initially going to have a chapter in the volume.
I was just going to be the moderator for the dialogue.
And so I was sort of struggling to know what to do with the book.
It languished for years.
Because I had the other three chapters in this book were written, I think they were
finished in 2017.
Did the book work in that direction?
Did you feel like it worked?
Yeah, I think it would have worked in its original version, but I'm glad we didn't
go that route because I think it's better as not being an argument book.
I'm glad it's not an argument about who's right, which I'm glad it's not that it's
I can see how the argument can almost get in the way of let's just focus on a really
great idea.
Yeah, the rebuttals come later.
But here's the idea.
Yes, exactly.
Well, and it's different than David Bentley Hart, David Bentley Hart bringing universalism
to save the world.
And he's so acerbic and he's so like, like confrontational and in your face and belittling.
And I love that we're no this is the guys the point is universalism, right?
I mean, it's going past the trials, the pain and mistakes and ultimately reconciling.
That's the whole point.
It's called reconciliation, right, David?
And he gets to do what he gets to do.
But thank you.
Right.
Also that book.
So Michael McClymons, The Devil's Redemption came out in 2018.
And then David Bentley Hart's book, you know, that came out in 2019.
So that happened after my book was already under contract after most of these chapters
have already been written.
And that was actually a big reason why I decided to shift away from that format, because you
had pro-con work already out there arguing about this issue.
And one of the things that McClymons book and also Hart's book in another way just made
me realize we need to have we need to be clear that there are different versions of universalism
on the table.
You know, Hart is I love Hart's book, but it's also being Hart, he kind of bulldozes
you and this is the only way to think this is the only position to have.
And I don't think that's the case.
I don't think that's the only position to have.
I think that in many respects, I quite agree with Hart.
But there are plenty of other ways to think about this issue, plenty of other theological
approaches to this topic that we should also listen to.
And so that's the spirit in which I tried to kind of refashion this volume and make
it work.
So Robin Perry, who's in the volume, convinced me to write a chapter as well that would represent
the view that I had written about in The God Who Saves.
How did you feel about that?
I appreciated it.
And I think it was a good exercise for me because my own theology had shifted a bit
since The God Who Saves.
That was since then and now it's eight years and my theology has undergone some changes.
So the chapter in here is I think an improvement in some ways on my book.
And it was a good experience to work through those ideas another time.
So I appreciated that from Robin.
Awesome.
Yeah.
So that's kind of where...
Let's dive into your existential aspect of it.
And then we'll touch on each one, but give us yours because yours sounds the most unique.
It's the most unique.
Yeah.
And I'm sure if somebody like Hart or somebody would just say, you know, he's not part of
the conversation, which is fine.
The score is yours.
There's no rebuttal.
Yeah, there's no rebuttal right now.
So just a little bit more about my bio to understand this chapter and where I'm coming
from because in between my blog series and this book, I did a whole...
I did years and years of scholarship and publication on an existential theologian named Rudolf
Boltmann.
So Rudolf Boltmann is a German theologian, New Testament exegete, very famous back in
the 50s and 60s.
And I've devoted years of my life to understanding his work.
And one of the things that always troubled me about Boltmann is that he's not a universalist.
He doesn't think that there's a way to reconcile universalism with the existential claim of
the gospel.
For him, to be existential means we have to respect each person's individual existence
in the way in which we respond and follow Christ.
And there are people who are not going to respond, not going to follow Christ.
And therefore, there's no way to reconcile existentialism or an existential Christianity
and universalism.
Universalism speaks in these totalities, these grand totalizing visions, right?
And that's kind of antithetical to an existential approach to faith.
So what I set out to do in both my previous book and then in this chapter more specifically
is to set out an attempt to reconcile a universal salvation with a deep understanding and respect
for the fact that faith is a personal and individual experience.
And we can't lose sight of that.
And the way I brought those together was by using Dietrich Bonhoeffer's idea of unconscious
Christianity.
So Bonhoeffer, the martyr who was killed in the Nazi prison, one of his lesser known
ideas that he develops early in his life but then comes back to in his later prison writings
is this idea of an unconscious Christianity, a Christianity of Matthew 25, a Christianity
of this kind of the faith of the child.
He often talks about the infant who's baptized as having this kind of this true direct faith
in God that the faith of the adult doesn't quite have.
When you get to the adult stage, you have this more kind of reflective faith that sort
of grasps a hold of God and spirituality and tries to make it something for themselves.
Whereas the child, the infant, the one who's not reflective is just purely in the grip
of a reality outside of themselves.
Let me stop you real quick because science has a really good explanation of how that's
possible because until you're about nine, you have no prefrontal cortex.
A child like my grandson lives with me right now and I get to watch him.
A child literally is just a feeling object.
It gets the experience but has no capacity to judge it.
Judge.
Exactly.
To come online means you can now parse it and organize it and separate it.
That's the uniqueness of the naivete is you're just pure experience.
Pure awareness.
Yeah.
Pure observation.
I think that's spot on.
That's really helpful.
Yeah.
I took that idea from Bonhoeffer and just ran with it and said, what if we think about
faith in this level, in this way, what does that do to the question of salvation?
Bonhoeffer has a line.
He has this one line in one of his prison writings where he says, unconscious Christianity,
colon.
Maybe this is where we can go to for universalism or apocynosyces is the word he uses.
He has this throwaway line and I develop an entire work around that one line of Bonhoeffer.
What I'm trying to flesh out, and I don't think my approach is the only way to do this.
There's other ways I think you could develop this idea is to say, what if saving faith
is found primarily in this unconscious experience of being taken out of ourselves, moved outside
of ourselves, maybe encountering a reality of something outside of our ego that draws
us out of our egocentricity and moves us out towards others?
Yeah.
Now, that's a broad generalized description of it.
I think what I want to say is in Christianity, Christianity provides a more reflective articulation
of this idea of grace, of being drawn beyond ourselves towards by God.
It can provide an explanation for how that's possible and what that means.
But that at some deep fundamental level, the original primal version of salvation is this
experience of being taken out of ourselves.
What did the disciples feel?
That's kind of what you're talking about.
It's not that Christianity is the only exclusive means by which that can happen.
It's just the way of articulating what is happening for everybody at all times.
Every person is experiencing this reality.
What I want to say is what Christianity provides, what Christian theology provides is a way
of describing this universal experience that happens throughout the world.
Christianity is articulating that in terms of a relationship to Christ.
We can articulate it in however we want to articulate it, whether it's the work of the
spirit or we can describe it in different doctrinal terms.
But the point is it's a description of a universal experience that happens everywhere.
What I'm trying to propose is that that's salvation happening right there.
That is the work of God, the redemptive work of God occurring existentially in each person's
life in an unconscious way, which then the church offers a conscious place to articulate
that unconscious experience.
Let me explain what I hear you saying and then you tell me if that's it.
The idea is essentially everyone is a Christian.
Everyone is saved, but only a few have the conscious understanding of it and awareness.
Is that what you're saying?
That's one way of saying it.
How would you say it?
You put the words.
That's totally fair.
I think I'm trying to be careful of not describing other people as Christian unless they're conscious
of it.
You can say saved.
Yeah, yeah.
I think this is a challenge I've been trying to internalize because I think this is an
important issue.
I think within a Christian community, I could describe other people as unconscious Christians
as what Bionicle does, but I wouldn't tell them you are an unconscious Christian.
I like human being better because I think that's more original and more conscious to
God's original understanding of it, but I think that's still limiting.
I'm sort of reducing things down to I am because any words I put on are simply limiters.
They're not describers, but they're ultimate limiters.
How does one in your theology move from unconscious to conscious?
I want to be clear that I don't think anyone has to move from unconscious to conscious,
so I think it's not an expectation that must occur.
There's no hell that they're going to experience for not believing.
That's an important question.
Right, precisely.
Yeah.
Because they're already in.
Yeah, they're in in that sense.
The unconscious reality has already affected them.
Can you tell me though?
We studied a lot of things and we studied why in Johns Hopkins, a whole bunch of stage
four cancer victims who decided to undergo a psilocybin experiment taking a hero's dose
of mushrooms of five grams came out of that with a feeling of absolute transcendent.
It was as essentially existent in existence.
Their experience transcended everything else they've been told.
They felt a loving cosmic presence.
They didn't convert to Christianity, but there was something that happened in their ego death,
in whatever happened that helped them not only recognize a loving cosmic force, but
also that they lost their fear of death.
Absolutely.
Same experience.
Right.
Yeah.
But that took something.
It took a catalyst.
People meditate.
You've got the early mystics, Norwich.
You've got the contemplatives.
All these people have had some kinds of experience with the living God that nobody can take away
from them.
On their deathbeds or whatever, that's there.
I would still consider that a cosmic kind of thing.
How do you actually identify these group of people as having this unconscious Christianity
without having that relevant moment that actually helped them get there?
You understand what I'm trying to get at?
Yeah, I see what you're getting at.
I think those are all cases of what I would call some sort of consciousness, conscious
religious, conscious transcendence.
I think those are all transitional stages where they've gone from the unconscious to
the conscious.
I think that part of what I think the church ought to be, what it's largely not, but what
it ought to be is a place that helps people make that transition from the unconscious
to the conscious.
It illuminates for people, gives people a language and a vocabulary for the experiences
they're already having but don't have the lens to see.
The unconscious is the splinter in the mind's eye.
Morpheus is telling Neo something is driving him mad.
It's unconscious.
He doesn't know what it is.
That's when he breaks through and has that conscious existential experience of, holy
shit, I'm in the real world now.
That's it.
Something has been driving him unconsciously.
I think that that's where we have this idea even in Romans 2 where you can even say, hey,
boys and girls, the poor people who are dying after getting slaughtered, who've never heard
the voice of the word of God, they're going to be okay because God has written on their
hearts this almost natural kind of conscience.
I love where you're going with this.
That's exactly what I'm... Yeah.
Certainly many people have commented about this reality that even very conservative evangelicals
are quite ready to articulate the traces of transcendence that are all woven into everywhere.
I think the difference between my position and their position is that I'm ready to say
that those people are already encountering salvifically the actual God.
It's not as if those are just moments that you can then use to apologetically get them
into a belief in a doctrine and go to church and then they're saved.
You tithe.
Make sure you tithe.
Exactly.
Right.
I think that's how... Those traces of transcendence typically are used apologetically as arguments
to get people to then go to church, subscribe to their doctrine, and then they can have
the fullness of it.
Right?
Well, that's what Paul, the Romans, is saying that they're guilty because creation's already
expressed his goodness.
That is their prerogative is to now go and be better.
You've been given this.
Right?
You've been shown evidence of what's going on.
Right?
Yeah.
Right.
David, here's the argument question.
I don't want to push too hard, but I think this is a simple one to go after.
What does the world do with Hitler in your theology?
Is he in?
Yes.
He is, of course.
Yeah, absolutely.
No, I mean-
So it is fully inclusive?
It's fully inclusive.
No, no, no.
No one's out.
No, no, no.
Right.
But I do talk about this a little bit in the end of my chapter in the book because I do
think that one of the... It's very common, and of course you've already encountered this
because you're asking me this question, but it's very common for people to try to have
the slam dunk against universalism by using moments of real tragedy, real evil in the
world and say, look, this is why this can't be true.
I think my problem with that approach, a whole line of questioning, is just that it assumes
that when the bad things in the world, that our understanding of God is to be the one
who's going to deal with them.
The point of a God, the point of believing in God is to have this cosmic judge to then
ultimately basically bless me, who is of course in the right, and destroy them, who of course
are in the wrong.
Right?
It's easy to use somebody like Hitler and say, well, obviously he's the one in the wrong.
Right?
But it's... I think they use-
Well, it's simply an object lesson to say, is there an exception?
Right.
Because if you have... Hitler's the tip of the spear.
Right, it is.
You can pull Hitler or any one of those guys.
Is this the exception?
Is there an exception?
And I think because that's the wrestling of the mind.
Is universalism really all in?
And that's what we wrestled with David, and that's kind of what, in your version, in your
view, it is completely all in.
Yeah, it is.
They're all in.
But I also think that the problems in the world that are very real, that we need to
take responsibility for them.
I mean, I think we as humans need to-
That's the adult approach, yes.
Right, yeah.
And not simply punt to God as the one who's going to assign all the bad stuff over here
and give us the good stuff here.
I think that's where most of humanity just hasn't yet matured to a point of understanding
that God isn't there to basically play referee for... That's a misuse, I think, abuse of
God.
Well, you can make a really good argument that God has been trying to tell us from the
beginning of scriptures, all scriptures, grow the fuck up.
It's like, come on, that's the point, is to grow up into love.
It's not rocket science, it's not bad for you, it's good for your health, mentally as
well.
Hey, there's grace, people.
I'm not going to hurt you, I'm not going to kill you, I'm not going to punish you, you're
going to punish yourself.
So stop doing that and grow up into love and realize, oh, you actually have value.
The best thing is universalism leads to a theology of love because it says, hey, we're
all in this together, there is no heaven and hell, there's just all of us together, figure
it out.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's right.
Okay, so give us the next point of view.
Do you feel like you've closed, like you've given a good view?
I think that's a good summary of my position.
There's certainly more to unpack if we wanted to, but let me go on to some other ones.
What about Robin Perry?
Yeah, so Robin Perry, maybe I should pair Robin Perry with the ancient Christian position.
So part of what Marina Ludlow is doing in her chapter on patristic or early Christian
universalism is to highlight what makes them unique.
The patristic one and the evangelical ones are similar in a number of respects.
They both accept that there is a punishment after death.
There is a realm, a hell-like state, a realm of purgation that happens beyond death.
The big difference, I think, well, there's a couple of differences, but one big difference
between the patristic one and the evangelical one is just the conception of salvation itself.
The early Christians had a view of salvation more like a medical healing process.
They used healing metaphors and they used education metaphors.
So it was a pedagogical hell or a medical hell, a hospital hell.
So hell was a place to maybe purge you of the bacteria that accumulated in your soul
throughout the life.
Antiseptic, if you would.
Antiseptic, precisely, yes.
Or it could also be described as a classroom where you were being reeducated, a reeducation
camp for those who had been so corrupted in their minds and practices and habits through
their life in the world that they needed to be completely retaught how to be human, how
to be in the image of God.
Which I love about that is because it's very restorative.
It is.
Like I said, hey, let's not throw you baby out with bath water.
There's a human being here.
That's what I love about it.
Yes.
I don't think for some it's painful enough, though.
It seems like it's healing.
The Colossus is what I want to talk about, the pruning.
That's what Barkley uses.
Well, Ludlow's chapter does.
She gets into the painful parts, too.
I mean, it was certainly for Gregory of Nyssa and Origen and others.
There was no shortage of pain in the afterlife.
Sometimes they almost dwell a lot.
They go at length about how painful it's going to be.
They don't have any shortage of that, but it is all oriented toward a final redemption,
a final healing and restoration.
Or in the case of Gregory of Nyssa, though, it goes on and on forever.
It never ends.
For him, it's not necessarily painful, but it is an ongoing process in which you will
never arrive.
Oh, for Nyssa, it was not an ultimate reconciliation.
There is an ECT of sorts.
It's hard to describe.
I mean, it is an ultimate reconciliation, but the process of being purged or at least
conformed to Christ is a never-ending process.
It's an eternal journey.
His word for that is epictasis.
It's this ongoing process that will never be completed.
It's an eternal journey.
We are always going deeper and deeper and deeper into God for Gregory of Nyssa.
The other ones had a little more of a static conclusion or at least a finality to it, but
Nyssa is a bit more open-ended.
That's more of the ancient version of universalism.
There's also other features of that, like the redemption of Satan, for instance, those
kinds of ideas.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah, of course.
The angels, all the fallen angels.
It's a cosmic vision.
The whole heavenly hosts and the infernal demonic forces, all of it is included.
It's all part of that.
It's not just human-centric.
For the evangelical one, though, it is more human-focused.
It's more about us, about people.
It's less about- Who made the argument?
Who made the- Or Perry.
Perry did that.
Yeah, Robin Perry.
Yeah, Robin Perry did.
Yeah.
Now, he's not the originator of this idea.
He's simply- He just put it together.
He's put it together.
What's great about his chapter in this volume is that he goes through the history of evangelical
universalism and really unpacks the various people who have espoused some version of this.
It's an old view.
It goes back hundreds of years.
Before George McDonald?
Did it go back before- Before that, yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, back into the 1700s, even.
Yeah.
It goes back a ways.
Okay.
Very cool.
I think one of the distinguishing features of it is that there is a very clear heaven
and hell.
In order to be saved, you do have to have a personal decision of faith.
It's a very evangelical view about faith as this personal commitment to Christ.
That's the saving moment.
The difference here is, for those who go to hell, hell is a place that is designed to
lead people to make their decision of faith for Christ.
It's like Earth.
Yeah, in some way, right?
Fair enough.
Very fair.
At some point, everyone will.
That's the idea for Perry's vision.
There's less of this kind of purgative ongoing journey of education and healing.
It's more of this decision-based focus on salvation.
Would you say that it's one of the things that I loved about David Artman is he gets
the Calvinistic and Armenian on both sides.
Grace is for all on the Armenian, and Grace saves completely on the Calvinist side.
He says there's both.
Would you say that there is still, is that more of a free will kind of thing, or do you
think that God is still actually the uncaused cause, the actual, he's doing the drawing
to them ultimately in that regard?
Yeah, for the evangelical position, I think it's sort of similar to Artman's.
It is trying to reconcile a bit of the Calvinists and a little bit of the Armenian.
I think Robin Perry's evangelical approach probably falls more on the Armenian side on
the issue of what is salvation.
It's not a divine decision of election.
It's a personal decision of faith.
That being said, he is trying to show how elements of both Calvinism and Armenianism
can be held together and that there's a way of kind of surpassing that divide.
That's not so much in this chapter, but I think Thomas Talbot in his book is an example
of that.
You might know his work.
Every knee shall bow, right?
Yeah, I think he quotes the one day every tongue will confess to your God, one day every
knee will bow, right?
And not enforced obedience, but an actual acquiescence, an actual my Lord, my God kind
of thing, which is a great visual, right?
Yes.
David, was there a fourth?
There's a fourth.
So the fourth one is what's called a Bardian or post-Bardian universalism.
This is an attempt- I'm interested in this one because I love Bart.
Bart's great.
I think what's interesting about Bart is that he's a reformed or broadly Calvinist theologian
working in that tradition.
And what he does in the 1930s and 40s is to rethink election, divine election or predestination.
He comes to a very strong critique of Calvin on this point and the Calvinist tradition.
And whereas the Calvinist tradition said that God elects individuals, you know, individuals
for salvation, others for condemnation.
Bart says election is first and foremost and really only about Jesus Christ.
Jesus is the one who is the God who elects because he's God, but he's also the one who
is elected as human.
And so what Bart does is say election is really all about Jesus and only secondarily, it's
all also about all humanity because all humanity is included in humanity and Jesus.
His humanity is our humanity and therefore his election is our election.
Right?
In other words, it's a one for all.
It's a scapegoat.
It's the one for all.
You need the universal scapegoat.
Here it is.
I don't need to do it anymore.
Is that what you're saying?
In some ways.
I mean, that's a René Girard way of describing it.
Yes.
The scapegoat theory idea.
But yes, I mean, for him, yes.
So he's the way that Bart puts it is Christ is the judge judged in our place.
So the divine judge is also the one who is judged as human and he's done that for all
on behalf of all.
David, were you a part of any of the emerging church conversation or follow any of that?
Yes, I was.
I was.
I was actually part of an emerging church when I was at Princeton.
You were?
Yeah.
Wow.
Oh, which one?
At that time, it's no longer around, but it was called the Well.
Yeah, I know the Well.
I was on the board of Emergent Village.
That's why I ask is that was sort of the beginning of deconstruction and challenging a lot of
these ideas, at least for me, it was when it became kind of bigger news and the emergent
church, I think, gave people permission to deconstruct.
The conversations were these pods of people just saying, well, I'm gay, so can I get into
heaven?
Yeah, very real conversations about what does it mean to be a human being and how does God
fit into that?
That's when the wrapper came off for me and kind of really wrestling with the idea of
it.
You said it started around 2005 because mine started around 2008.
Yeah, 2005, that's when I started my MDiv program at Princeton Seminary and that's when
I started my blog about universalism.
I came to Princeton basically already ready to say I'm a universalist.
I was just kind of on the cusp.
I just wanted to read a little bit more and then say, okay, now I'm ready to go.
I just wanted to have a little bit more under my belt before I was ready to tackle it.
At that point, did you feel like you had the argument made in your head or you had the
belief in your head?
Because for me, it was what I realized is that I believed it when I thought I had it
and then I realized, oh, God, I didn't know anything.
Then you learned more and then you realized, that's what David Arman, David Arman put
it all together for me.
Did you have that at that time?
I had the belief.
I didn't quite have the argument and that's mainly because I hadn't read much theology
at all before I got to Princeton.
I wasn't ready to do it.
One of the things that I, when I read David Bentley Hart's book, for instance, Hart talks
about in the very beginning of his book, he talks about how he never really was intellectually
ever comfortable with the idea of hell from his childhood.
I really resonated with that.
I was never a hard line believer in the traditional heaven hell doctrine growing up.
For me, becoming an explicit outspoken universalist was not that much of a step for me.
The belief was already there.
I think it had been there for a long time.
I just didn't have the freedom to say and articulate it until I was really and fully
and truly outside the realm of evangelicalism.
I was at Princeton seminary where I could say whatever I wanted now.
Did you like the freedom?
What was that?
Did you like the freedom there?
I loved the freedom there.
It was great.
It was such a liberating experience for me to be surrounded by people who didn't care
where my theology was going because they were already there themselves or were doing some
other thing.
I could really develop myself without feeling constrained or pressured to go a certain way.
The polemics are out the door.
It's actually an open co-creation of ideas and alignment of things.
The stuff that doesn't really make a lot of sense, you just leave it by the side instead
of decimate somebody.
I do believe that God bless David Artman.
He asks us these questions.
We were on his blog.
He's like, do you affirm this?
Okay, good.
Jonathan and Rich, do you check?
Check.
It was awesome.
It was a 20 questions thing.
I think that's going to be helpful.
There's going to be people on the apologist side that are going to need to have the, what
do you call it, the case for Christ kind of guy, Lee Stobel.
Oh yeah, I have those books brought up.
Yeah, you're going to have to have that kind for certain.
Then you're going to have to have this general, hey, let's talk about the character of God
and what the plan is and how we actually come together in this idea.
That's where I think the most healthy kind of conversations come into play.
Then you start to build and you start to get different angles.
Here's the early church fathers and here's this kind of really philosophical strong foundation
for it.
Over here, by the way, there's some pretty good scripture for it too in terms of where
this is going.
Anyway, yeah, this has been awesome.
David, when did you realize you could say it with comfort?
Well, universalism.
I mean, it really wasn't.
We're all going to heaven.
We're all going to be in the same place.
I wasn't comfortable saying it.
I wasn't comfortable saying it until I got to Princeton.
I think I just needed to be out of Wheaton and also away from my family context.
I could be anonymous there for a bit and I think that really allowed me to speak freely
for once.
I think that was really what was the difference for me.
You got your MDiv or your…
I did my MDiv and then I did my PhD there as well.
I stayed on.
That wasn't the plan initially, but pretty quickly I learned that this is what I wanted
to do with my life.
Bruce McCormick was who I went there to study with.
I had heard of him when I was at Wheaton.
He came to Wheaton when I was there to speak for the theology conference at Wheaton College.
My professors at Wheaton said, you should go study with him.
I made that decision really without investigating it further.
I was like, okay, if that's what they said to do, I'll do it.
I hadn't read any of his works before I went to Princeton.
I just knew that he was the person to study with and I made the right choice.
He was a great advisor, great professor.
He gave me freedom to develop my theology, but also to do it in a rigorous way.
He forced me to be careful and rigorous in my thought process.
Speaking of rigorous in thought process, your book, would you say that it's easier to read
than David Bentley Hart's stuff and maybe even Carl Bart's epistle to the…
He did a commentary on the Romans, didn't he?
Yes, he did.
Let us let our audience know if it's pretty approachable and kind of winsome or is it
a little bit heady and have a caveat for that.
Yes.
The book is…
There are elements of it that are a little bit heady, but overall it's written in a
winsome and accessible way.
I've tried to make it as…
It's probably at an undergraduate level, maybe a slightly advanced undergraduate level,
but not too advanced.
But certainly that doesn't require you to have a degree in theology to…
David, let me ask you a different way because the content of the book is really perspectives.
Why should someone…
Sally living in Cleveland, why should she care about this idea?
Because you'd spent a long time writing this book.
Why do you think it was valuable for someone like her?
I think the question of salvation is at the heart of the faith.
It's at the heart of Christianity and it touches on things at a very deep, kind of
almost primal level.
Because fundamentally what we want to know is, is our God a loving God?
Is the God that we worship a God worth worshipping?
At the root of everything we do, we want to know that that's true.
This question, we can't escape it.
We can't escape this issue of, is our God a good God?
Is the God of Christianity a good, just and loving God?
Now certainly people are going to disagree on what that means to be just, to be loving.
I think that's okay.
I think disagreement is fine and healthy.
I think the reason why this book is hopefully helpful is to show that there's a lot of
people who I know who are asking, like, I really want to know that my Buddhist neighbor
is going to be with God for eternity, or I really want to know that my brother-in-law
who left faith and is now atheist is going to be held by God for eternity in God's love.
I want to know that.
They want to know.
They want to say it.
They want to believe it, but they don't know that they can.
They don't know how.
I think this book is offering people a vision for Christianity that shows you, yes, this
is possible.
Christianity is a vast and complex and beautiful family of ideas and beliefs.
There's not just one Christianity that you either, if you have it or you don't, right?
Christianity is a huge family of ideas, and there's a place within it for somebody to
say everyone is saved.
Everyone is held in God's grace.
You don't have to wrestle with this tension of trying to square a circle.
These things can be held together, and here are a few different ways that it can be.
Final question, and Rich, I'll let you ask one more.
How did it change your life to step into that freedom and then write a book about it, which
is kind of like saying, okay, here's a bullhorn of what I believe, but it's a very powerful
message.
How did it change your life?
Well, losing my job was a negative way that changed my life.
I mean, on the whole, though- You think you could have fit in that culture
for a long time?
Sorry?
Oh, could I fit?
That's a good question.
I don't know if I could have.
I couldn't.
I had to step out, yeah.
Yeah.
I'm glad not to be there, and I'm glad to be where I am.
I mean, it was the right thing for me.
It was just a very painful thing.
Yeah, and it was painful.
Yeah.
Sometimes it's hard.
Yeah.
It's part of the growth process.
Because you went through the pain, and what did you get out of it?
What I got out of it was a sense of solidarity with those who have also lost their jobs and
lost their positions for their convictions.
Peter Enns was somebody who I had known when I was at Princeton.
He had lost his job at Westminster Seminary while I was at Princeton.
He used to come up to Princeton a lot.
We would talk sometimes.
When that happened, and then I've had other friends of mine who lost their jobs.
The philosophy professor introduced me to Augustine, who I told you about.
He lost his job at Wheaton College for becoming Catholic when I was there as a student.
There have been a number of people in my life who had been forced out of their positions
and kind of exiled from the communities in which they were establishing themselves.
That experience losing my job was certainly a life-changing moment for me in terms of
coming to grips with that and realizing what all that involved.
I don't want to dwell on that too much.
I think that universalism is by and large a very positive thing for me.
It's not all about my experience, but it's really more about-
No, but I meant what is it?
I think what I'm asking is, you went through the pain of declaring, I am a universalist.
What was the value of holding onto that experience, of holding onto a universal faith that says,
hey, we're all of the same cloth here?
I think training and empathy.
I think training a vision to see others as already saved, as already in God's grace.
Learning not to see the world in terms of an us and them dichotomy between the rejected
and the redeemed.
I think that's part of the pernicious legacy of the doctrine of hell has been to cultivate
a vision of the world in which there's them and then there's us.
That line of divide is between the good and the evil, between the lost and the saved.
That vision of the world, it can be so toxic, it can be so damaging.
It has tendrils that go out into all kinds of other areas, ethics and politics and all
the rest.
What I think universalism has done for me and for others and what it still does is to
cultivate an alternative way of being in the world, to train me and to see everyone as
connected to each other and to God.
Love it.
All right, I got an easy one.
Was C.S.
Lewis a leaky universalist?
Sure.
Lewis was a very important part of my life as well, I should say.
I worked at the C.S. Lewis archives at Wheaton College my entire time I was there.
I was the student editor for the C.S. Lewis journal that they produced called Seven at
the Marion Wade Center.
I was deeply involved.
I went on a C.S. Lewis trip to Oxford as part of the Wheaton College as a student there.
I spent a summer in Oxford and went to the Kilns.
Did you like his theology or writings?
At that point it was more his writings, his fiction, especially until we have faces and
those works.
But The Great Divorce was a beautiful book.
It was a pivotal moment for me to read that work and really ponder it.
It did lead me to read George MacDonald, who I read also.
A mentor of C.S. Lewis.
I loved his work, Red Fantasies and other works.
Lewis was important for me, absolutely.
I do think he's much closer to a universalist than the evangelicals want him to be.
A hundred percent.
When you first said The Fire and the Rose as your blog, I'm thinking of the child and
the egg.
I'm just thinking, okay, is this the Inklings?
Are we talking Tolkien and Lewis?
It's a line from T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, actually.
Okay, there you go.
It's definitely in the same vicinity, though.
It's in the same realm, for sure.
I love it.
I can't wait to dive into the book.
I can't wait to hear more and chat more about you.
I think that we're hearing from David Artman that he's really trying to get an actual
kind of a conference together that's going to get a meeting of the minds together.
There's nothing like Big Ten Christianity that we would have seen with Brian McLaren
days and what do you call it?
The wild goose?
Yeah, sure, wild goose.
But maybe a smaller, like a microcosm of some of those bigger things, but it would be a
great thing to get a little bit more visibility and some great speakers and some people attending.
It seems like somebody could be on the horizon.
It would be a great thing.
It should bring a lot of people to it.
David, thank you very much for joining us.
This has been an absolutely wonderful conversation.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's wonderful.
Thank you.
Absolutely.
All right, everybody.
Thank you for joining us.
This is again, every week is just so much fun.
This is going to be an incredible.
This is our third this week and it's been absolutely incredible.
Hope you enjoy them.
Please comment, review, let us know, send us email and let us know what you'd like us
to talk about or if you have a guest you'd recommend, please send them.
They're so much fun when you do that.
So have an awesome week weekend, everybody.
It's Friday here and much love, everybody.