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INTRODUCTION

A Synopsis of the Christian Universalist Controversy


The spirit-doctrine of Christian Universalism, also known as Universal (Ultimate) Reconciliation, Total Reconciliation (Restoration), and (sometimes) the Victorious Gospel teaches that eventually every human soul consigned at the judgment  to hell and the Lake of Fire will yet eventually be “saved,” wherein the torments of netherworld judgment will lovingly mystically work as correction alongside the death of Christ to bring all creatures to reconciled union with Christ by “faith”—something which must (but few adherents will admit) require ultimate reconciliation with Lucifer, his angels and all other hellish creatures including Nephilim (half human / half fallen angels).

Christian Universalism’s core argument is based in the a priori human belief that a truly loving good God must by His very Nature bring about universal reconciliation, and therefore will cause it to happen. This belief is supported by four primary scripture vocabulary-based arguments in which

1)       the words “all” and “every,” in reference to salvation, inherently show that salvation is an absolute effectual power expressing the unthwartable determined will of God to unexceptionally "save" even the netherworld domain;

2)        the words “all” and “every,” wherever referencing creation’s future worship of God under restoration must be interpreted redemptively across creation, and creation must further be assumptively understood to include the netherworld by such time,

3)       time is presumed to have an end, and since the original Hebrew and Greek vocabulary describes all future events—including netherworld judgment—literally in terms of “time out of view” and “ages” (not timeless “eternity”), such judgment must have an end, and

4)       the apostle Paul’s single statement that at “the end” God becomes “all in all” (I Cor. 15:24→28) is the proof-positive declaration of universal reconciliation that subsumes the entirety of biblical cosmology.

Additionally, adherents of this teaching given to "revelationism" support their belief by a claim to a private "inner witness of the Holy Spirit" that Christian Universalism is true.   


Upon these primary thought pillars and claim to an "inner witness", Christian Universalism proceeds to string together a very extensive “skin-deep” collection of individualized scriptures which, when taken together (but apart from their roots in the organic whole), quite appear to support the Universalist narrative. At the same time, and to deal with the remainder of the scripture whole, Christian Universalism refutes all other commonly understood anti-redemptive scripture terminology (such as destruction, annihilation, judgment, wrath, etc.) by counterintuitively transmuting their meanings to accommodate redemptive intent and purpose. This is sometimes accomplished by parsing original Greek and Hebrew words to “find” more redemptive meanings to such words, and other times by interpreting such words “prophetically” to craft a redemptive meaning out of them.

Alongside the foregoing, Christian Universalism brings forth collateral arguments based on 1) an emasculate portrayal of God’s compassion as His universally defining and governing attribute, 2) human questions of fairness and justice, 3) appeasement of the world's offense and negative perception of God and 4) appeals to early post-apostolic church fathers and other notables in church history who bought into the doctrine. Its most ardent proponents go beyond to impugn the reliability of all the common English translations of the Bible, charging all the scholars of the centuries with “human bias” for having used the timeless words “eternal” and “forever” to translate all the original language words for duration.  

As a means of persuasion, Universalists* coax the unmoved with the line that Christian Universalism is just an alternate but valid “perspective” on the fate of the damned (though the fine print of the scripture whole will show that the doctrine actually posits an alternate “salvation” and gospel.) And then finally, when all preceding lines of reason fail to persuade, the most doctrinaire proponents will resort to creating an artificial moral and spiritual “high ground” by leveling ad hominem insinuations against those who do not acquiesce to the teaching (“You don’t really ‘love’ people. You don’t ‘want’ people to be saved. You have a ‘mean’ spirit. You create ‘your own theology’ from scripture with a ‘carnal’ and ‘fleshly’ mind,” etc.). 

The reason for this elaborate mire of word-craft argument and its concluding emotion-bated character assault of the unpersuaded is that Christian Universalism is actually not just a doctrine. It is a spirit—a deceiving and controlling anti-rational spirit at war with common human language. That spirit grows to consume the hearts of its believers, leading them to see themselves as the “lone faithful witnesses” to the “truth” of biblical cosmology and to make it their life cause to promote this teaching within the body of Christ—as is characteristic of any spirit of cultic heresy. In these modern end times, the Christian Universalist spirit was seeded into and has come to fullest expression through the Latter Rain Movement giving the doctrine its unique modern "revelationist" flavor, proceeding to gain significant inroads in the contemporary mainstream prophetic movement.             

Of important significance is the means by which Christian Universalist doctrine is transmitted. Very very few who come into the persuasion of this teaching do so by their own uncoaxed reading of the Bible alone. (That this is so is witnessed by the Universalist need to attack the reliability of all the common English translations of the Bible.) The Christian Universalist believer is almost always “converted” to this teaching by reading some other man’s book promoting it. And the reason the new believer buys into the “guru’s” writing is because he or she usually has already first doubted the scripture’s cover-to-cover organic testimony to God’s never-closed enmity with the damned. The Universalist convert already does not want to believe that the universal enmity left unclosed by the scripture mainframe can or should be the final outcome. ("It's just not right!")


Thus, to support the doubt against scripture’s organic unreconciled presentation, Universalist teaching must transmit itself by marshaling one extra-biblical writer after another who can best articulate the word-craft and extra-biblical arguments necessary to challenge the plain commonly read testimony of the Bible's apostles and prophets. (Dependence upon the few post-apostolic and modern gurus would be unnecessary if the teaching were true. For the average Spirit-born and Spirit-filled believer would intuitively see the "vast promise" of universal reconciliation just as plainly throughout the scripture mainframe as he sees the message of John 3:16, without some other modern or ancient author’s particular support.)                 

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In this undertaking, we are combating the syndrome known by the phrase, “can’t see the forest for the trees.” This abstract steps out from the usual “tree by tree” analysis of isolated unconnected scriptures, above the gymnastic, flim-flammed redefinitions of isolated vocabularies and beyond the myopic “numbers-based” debating over time “durations” and “headcounts” of the saved versus the damned—to instead examine the entire forest of the apostles' and prophets' thought flow from which all cosmological truth regarding salvation and universal enmity is drawn, and apart from which it cannot be known. In doing this, we will put all the “red herring” vocabulary and numbers arguments in their place, answering the one and only true question at stake: “Does the testimony of even one scripture author show that Christ’s death will eventually yield an ultimate, final and complete closure to the universe-wide enmity continuum across all three cosmologic domains (heaven, earth and the netherworld) occasioned by Lucifer and Adam’s violation of God’s holiness?”         

In course of proving the Bible’s negative answer to this question, we will examine only scripture as contexted only by the minds of the writers themselves including the thought flow of Jesus Himself from the gospels through to the Book of Revelation. We have no need to appeal to any post-apostolic guru for external support of our conclusions. For purposes of clarifying ancient cultural beliefs behind certain scriptures and concepts of time, we briefly reference 3 other modern writers’ comments—none of which is critical to proving the cover-to-cover biblical concept of a delimitedly effectual, terrestrially-only engaged salvation that is wholly and only preventative of subjection to a never closed enmity with the netherworld.        

The Form of this Abstract

This abstract consists of 11 major parts subdivided into themed sections marked with a section symbol (§).

Because of the vastness of the scriptural forest “floor” to be covered, this writing must necessarily take the form of a bulleted abstract in which numbered points and sub points are “simply” made supported by scripture references with minimal narrative. (By “simply,” we mean that concepts are put into as few words as possible. But in many cases, the concepts are deep or complex, requiring diligent consideration.) It is for the reader to apply diligent consideration to the phrasing used in making each point and to examine the scripture references to prove the veracity of the point made by them.

Multiple scripture references within the same point are separated between books and chapters by semi-colons (;), with chapter verses separated by commas (,). All book references are italicized (except inside of sub-commentary). Following is a typical abstract point:

Ex.

1. The salvation to age-enduring life occurs by the spiritual consuming of Christ as the living bread and water (Jn. 4:14; 6:27, 32-35, 48-58; 7:37-39).

In some points, scripture references are used in relation to other scriptures to make a complete point. These relational references are separated by “arrows” (→) where the first reference is “pointing to” the second reference to make an association of thought.