The Implications of Addiction Recovery for Universal Salvation - Thad Cox

When you work closely with those struggling with addiction, universalism increasingly becomes a foregone conclusion.

 

The "repent or perish" motif is cast in a new light. With addicts, the very capacity to repent, to choose, has been infected and impeded. They often aren't in control of their behavior to any meaningful extent. Often, their perceptions and capacity to prioritize their own needs have been wholly compromised. A drug has become more important to them than food or friends and family.

 

It's not that an addict comes to some rational conclusion about the matter and freely decides to forsake all things for the sake of a high. Rationality itself has, for them, been chemically and neurologically subverted. They literally "know not what they do" anymore. What addict could not relate to St. Paul's account of his struggles with sin in Romans 7?

 

"I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. ...I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me."

 

Spend enough time around addicts and you begin to see yourself and all fallen humanity in them. We have all been blinded by some kind of addiction; all of us have been intoxicated by some falsity we take to be our highest good, our ultimate concern. Every sin we commit is a kind of relapse.

 

We often "know better," just as the Roman soldiers and the Sanhedrin "knew" perfectly well what they were doing. But in that moment, they were blinded in their knowing. The higher orders of perception and judgment were incapacitated. In that higher and more fundamental sense, "they knew not." Their addictions had them in bondage to baser instincts.

 

So it is with every sinner and addict alike. Both are, without a doubt, in grave need of repentance. Both are in the process of perishing. But the One who came to seek and save those lost in the bondages, delusions, and addictions of sin, has demonstrated His unconditional love for, commitment to, and solidarity with them.

 

The Great Physician will not be satisfied until all are healed. His light will continue to shine into the darkness of our death, dysfunction, and alienation until all can finally see. The One who calls all to repentance will, by His grace, restore to all the capacity to repent. While we are often too eager to write off "hopeless cases," God never does. Not in this age, nor in the age to come.