Why I Don't Use the Language of "Christian Universalism" - Kenneth Tanner

I don’t use the language of “Christian universalism” because it’s too often associated with a false interpretation of reality, one that is absent repentance, theosis, and transfiguration.

We don’t enter the world that’s coming to this world without consent to the love that God is, by participating in the new humanity that God is in Jesus Christ, which is entirely a matter of grace but will not happen apart from our acceptance of the gift and our willing allegiance to the Giver, who leaves the human clothed in glory and in her or his right mind.

I believe it is the desire of God that all of his creatures come to exist as he exists, beyond the evil of death, which has been converted now as an entrance to life by the humanity of God in Jesus Christ, the One who has filled death, the grave, and hell with himself, and escaped them by embodied resurrection.

I believe that when “every knee bows” and “every tongue confesses” that that event will be an act of genuine freedom in all persons, a submission to the love that God forever is, to the beauty of the weakness of God on the cross, which is stronger than all the enemies of humanity, even the last enemy of humanity in the God we know as Jesus Christ—namely, death—and greater than any power which we can see (or ever will see) in nature or the cosmos.

Given humanity’s bold contempt to do and to say what is not a participation in the love that God forever is, our tendency to do and say what is opposed to our created goodness as persons made in God’s image (what the Scriptures call the “mystery of iniquity”), I do not know *when* or *how* this will happen in all persons but I trust that it will somehow happen in the end.

My friend Brad Jersak calls this “ultimate reconciliation.”

I trust that God gets what God wants and that what God sets out to do—to rescue his creation from futility, to arrest his image-bearers from a fall into non-existence—eventually somehow happens. Paul and John apparently do, too, if the New Testament witness is right.

It’s clear enough to me—though I don’t know what I don’t know—that this repentant transfiguration involves embracing the fire that is the love of God, a consuming fire that we can trust because the character of God revealed in Jesus Christ is a love that wounds us only to heal that which is not of love in us so that we can truly welcome judgment.

We can fall into the hands of God because those hands know how to remove the tares from our virtues and the wheat from our vices and leave us only the persons God intends for us to be with him in eternity.

Like the fire in the burning bush on Sinai, the love of God blazes but does not destroy. This judgment leaves us alive and forever changed.

Comments

[Florian Berndt]

This has always made sense to me, as I found that "universalism" can quickly become a dogma that people argue about, constantly talking about different translations etc, while leaving out the larger story of the Gospel. In addition, I've met groups that claimed to believe in "universal reconciliation" in the sense that everyone will be finally forced to believe, making it all about the superiority of the divine will - again, leaving out the Gospel. Needless to say, these groups were usually very legalistic, literalistic and "nasty as hell" (pun intended). On the flip side, those who emphasised the Gospel (as Kenneth so wonderfully does in this post), pointing to the all-embracing love and mercy of Abba, the person and work of Christ, and the Holy Spirit's unfailing grace in our lives, were the one's that convinced me that Divine Love is having the last word, as they already showed forth the fruit of transformation in their lives, that is the destiny of all creation.