A Tract for Universalism // 12.8.17
I was raised in a church just straddling the fence that separates cults from your run-of-the-mill southern evangelicals. I say straddling the fence because the word “cult” connotes secret rituals, weird sex stuff, or violence, none of which describe my experience. But the dictionary definition holds true, and unfortunately, synonyms for “cult” swing to the other end, too gentle, the most condemning available would be perhaps “faction.” But, we don’t need this settled right now, it’s not my point.
A central feature of my religious education was the cultivation of a consuming fear of hell, fear that compelled one to dress correctly, speak correctly, think correctly—even once I was advised that I might be held liable for the content of my dreams—lest death or rapture take me at any moment, and I be lost to an eternal torment with no recourse nor appeal. I was taught that those in our sect were the only people on the planet with any hope for heaven, and even many of our own would number among the damned.
Such was my fear that many of my childhood days found me in our church’s prayer room, pleading with God for one thing: clemency for my father, who I had been told was a backslider, was living in sin, highwayed to hell. I’d lay on my face and whisper over and over, “God, please don’t let my dad go to hell,” promising anything, and if the prayer room was full of people shouting their prayers, as was wont to happen, or if I was assured of privacy, being the only one there, my whispers would increase to shouts and yelps, begging and bargaining with God for the soul of my father.
When I was 17 and headed off soon to a Christian college, I decided I must study up on my church’s doctrine, as I knew it would be challenged by scores of Christians doomed to hell for one sin or another, perhaps attending a movie theater or wearing tank-tops or believing in the Trinity. I started reading the Bible.
What I found there was a story of love and hope and grace, and soon I was able to ask these Christians if they would share with me this story I’d never heard before. I was enthralled. I listened to Francis Chan’s GRACE sermon series over and over. I still do. I read John Eldredge’s Beautiful Outlaw. I pored through the stories of others who had left the church I’d been born into, particularly Josh Spiers’s whyileft.org. I came to know the love of God through my peers in ways I had not previously known.
I was baptized later into the Anglican communion. The man who baptized me taught me to respond to those who I’d grown up around, who were truly confused by the idea that the work was done, that Christ came into the world to save sinners, to redeem the world to himself. My pastor explained the obvious, that when a person is loved, their response is not some apathetic thanks, but an enthusiastic compulsion to return that love, to introduce others to that love, to learn to love in that way.
Writing is the same way. I came to experience beauty through poetry, so I started to love poets, then to introduce others to those poets, and finally to try to learn to love in that same way, and that is why I wrote a book of poetry.
If you will know them by their fruit, then I am assured of my faith: where once was fear is now gratitude.
I started this blog post with the intention of writing about my universalism, my hope for universal reconciliation, once a faint dream, now a dear belief. Instead I have unloaded about my past and not mentioned my personal heresy once, so here instead I will point to a few of those who have helped me, a little or a lot, along the way.
This lecture by David Bentley Hart on the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, hell, and eventually universalism, is near impenetrable, thirty-eight minutes long, and beautiful. I listen to it often, and recommend it constantly. It is worth the time and energy it asks.
Lewis Carroll, a devout Anglican, more devout than I, wrote in a letter to his sister, “if I were forced to believe that the God of Christians was capable of inflicting ‘eternal punishment’ ... I should give up Christianity.”
Voltaire, on hell, in his Dictionnaire philosophique portatif, tells a story of a minister who had recently renounced the doctrine of hell to his congregation and was pulled aside by his peers and chastened, “My friend, I don’t believe in eternal damnation any more than you do, but it’s better if your maidservant, your tailor and even your procurator do believe in it.”
And here’s a bit from a poem of Guy Davenport, Beyond Punt and Cush. These few lines I’ve already posted to Twitter and Instagram, but like so much I am once again excerpting:
