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This is not a post about universalism. ;-P

About fourteen years ago a friend of mine, who was a pastor at a very large (1,700) church, confided that he was secretly a universalist.  He believed everyone was reconciled to God through grace.  When I heard the word my mind immediately shut off from the rest of what he was saying because I immediately brought all of my baggage to the word. I had been carefully taught that grace was for those who made a public confession of faith, not for everyone.  It was the last time I saw my friend, but that conversation stuck with me.

And then about four years ago, as a good friend of mine and I were headed to our Emergent cohort, we would tease each other with statements like, “Do you think I’m going to hell if I think everyone is already reconciled with God.” We were actively pondering the idea that people are already under grace.  They just didn’t know it.  My friend and I were wrestling with what it meant to speak that out loud into our world.  (And yes there was significant repercussions for both of us.) Throughout that process I kept thinking back to my pastor friend who felt like he needed to remain in the closet about that fact. I would later learn that there is an argument that much of the early church fathers believed in the universal nature of reconciliation.

My early education has taught me that to question what I had been taught would lead me down the dreaded “slippery slope.” But the conversations weren’t leading me into oblivion.  I was sliding down the slippery slope but I was discovering it was actually God’s slip-’n'slide. At the end of that process (at least for me) was not a rejection of faith and all that I had been taught, but a reframing and a redemption of what I had been taught. I spent close to the next three years seeking out and finding a Biblical argument based in Scripture for the universal nature of grace and reconcliation.  The result was my book, Discovering The God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity.  What I found was that grace didn’t become true at the cross.  It was always there.  But because of the nature of sin, we couldn’t see it.  Much of the journey of humanity is dis-covering what has always been there.

So a new friend of mine, who has always been universalist-unitarian and is pondering my bok said, “It’s become more apparent to me that universalism, as a pure theology, is reinventing itself through the emerging church as it continues to unfold and mature today.” My initial thought took me right back to that first conversation.  I thought, “Uh-oh! So many of my evangelical friends are going to pigeon-hole me by defining me by their understanding of the word.” I say that because I did the same thing. And then I’m spending so much of my time managing assumptions as opposed to having conversations. These conversations always lead to the assumption that God just lets everyone in and ignores the reality of history.  That’s not what I believe.  Someone always pays the cost in the nature of grace.

Writing my book was arguably the most restorative thing in my life because I wrote it to reconcile my own faith using Scripture.  I went back to the story I grew up in and asked if I could develop a logical, reasonable argument using what was already there.  And I did.  Everything hinged on the nature of reality as told in Gen 1-2.  Grace was already true.  Good was already true.  We couldn’t change what was true, but we could hide it.  Everyone was already in, but not everyone knew it.

I did write a recent post that stirred this process.  You can find it here.