After church this past Sunday I was approached by a parishioner who said that what I had just preached sounded a lot like universalism, the notion that all people will receive God’s salvation no matter what religious affiliation. My answer was that God is indeed a universalist. How could we in good conscience worship a God who would exclude anyone from God’s grace and favor. This is an old argument of course, one that has persevered over the centuries. Indeed the colonial Christian evangelists of the 19th and early 20th centuries held as their guiding principle the idea that unless one accepted Jesus Christ as their savior they would be consumed by the fires of hell, hence their zealous urgency to make Christ known to the world. Some crafty theologians softened this idea by proposing that lost souls would have yet another chance to accept Jesus after death, the so-called doctrine of universal explicit opportunity…..what!?
There is ample warrant in scripture that God is indeed a universalist. In Genesis God chooses Israel as God’s beloved so that Israel would be a light to all people; Israel a people as catalyst for the world’s transformation and restoration. In the Gospel of John we are told that Jesus is the way, but many Christians have interpreted this passage as exclusionary, that unless one believes in Jesus one will not be saved. This is a decidedly modern idea pervasive in our hierarchical culture. The point in John is that for salvation …(salvation a social, economic and political term…salvation in the ancient mind is akin to “well-being”) For salvation to take hold in our world one must practice the way of Christ, and from practice comes belief and trust of this way we are to live.
The point to be made here is that salvation is not about the individual. Salvation is for the world God loves; we the people of faith a part of this glorious process of salvation, not an end but a process, the world still in its becoming, the coming perfection taking root as we speak. No one is saved until all are saved. We must not believe in Jesus as an end unto itself, rather we must believe in the way of Jesus as a way of life. In practicing this manner of living we become the catalysts for change; we become the leaven of goodness which will continue God’s project of restoration; we artisans in the very process of creation itself. Wherever the brokenness of the world is being mended there Christ is. Indeed at the heart of the world’s great religions is the claim that God’s (by any name) goodness is manifested in acts of mercy, compassion, love and sacrifice….would that we all practiced such a faith….and in God’s time we, and we means all people of every race and nation and every faith…. will.
Beautiful.