I first saw this book back in December 2004 while visiting my relatives for Christmas. I enjoy reading, so I always go to the bookstore while there with my aunts, uncles, and cousins. I saw this book and didn't give it a second thought until I saw the subtitle: "Why God Will Save Every Person". Immediately the warning bells in my head went off and I picked it up and began to thumb through it.
Sure enough, it espoused the view that belongs to Universalism: that everyone who has ever lived or will live is going to eventually be saved, regardless of their relationship to God through Jesus while alive on earth. Last week I finally bought this book so I could begin a rebuttal of it. I was looking forward to my first rebuttal of a book and felt up for the challenge; instead, I was sorely disappointed that this book didn't argue intellectually for universalism, but appealed mainly to our emotions.
The book is heavy on the emotion from the very first line. It opens with a story of a woman who died suddenly of a stroke, while in her late 30s. The authors go on to say that she had led a rough life and had never accepted Christ as her savior, but that before she died she was beginning to seek God. The author then states (I have to use that term because you aren't sure who is writing what--they deliberately stay in the first person without ever making a distinction between the two of them, as stated in their introduction) that this was the turning point for him, when he stopped believing that God would send people to hell forever and that everyone would eventually be saved.
It was at this point that my hopes for an intellectual explanation of universalism began to wane.
As already stated, the book relies heavily on emotive force rather than sound exegesis and reasoning to justify its case. Among its many errors, the authors often resort to argument by outrage to justify their view of God. They claim that God is all loving and that His grace never ends, so they quite forcefully assert the usual Skeptical canard of, "How can a loving God send the vast majority of his children to hell to be tormented forever?" They are apparently unaware that the curse of infant mortality through history, though lamentable in its own right, means that the majority of God's "children", as they put it, didn't go to hell and still don't.
They also heavily emphasize Father when referring to God, as doting Father who hardly ever disciplines his children, but is instead patient enough to wait it out and let his children realize how much he loves them. Contextual study shows that they are impressing their modern views of the word father onto the text. When Jesus spoke of His Heavenly Father, He was referring to God as the Heavenly Patron, wanting to bestow his grace or favor upon his clients. Yes, within the ancient patron-client relationship, the patron was acting as if he adopted the clients as his children, but the boundaries separating the two were held intact. Furthermore, it must be understood that when Christ referred to God as Father, it was Father, and not "daddy" as many people today would have us believe.
Second, a proper understanding of grace needs to be achieved. Grace was offered by the patron to the client, and was understood to be a completely undeserved favor. To receive the favor, the client would react with gratitude towards the patron, bringing him honor. The authors present grace as a free gift, yes, but also insist that not only is it available to everyone, but that there is no time limit so to speak. They believe that a person can accept God's grace even after death, thus allowing for every person to be saved.
Next up on the list of errors, this book denies the need for Atonement and the deity of Jesus Christ. For a defense of the atonement, see here and for the divine claims of Jesus, see here. It simply asks why God can't forgive, and implies that carrying out justice is being mean and vengeful. On that issue here.
You are probably wondering by now how they justify these claims biblically. In short, they don't. They don't address any scripture that is contrary to their position. Their position is basically 1)the Bible is contradictory 2)I believe God to be "this way" 3)I only use these scriptures. It is also ironic how quickly they switch position on scriptures. One moment they are praising God for being gracious and merciful to Adam and Eve by not killing them for eating the fruit, the next they are condemning this version of God who is sending a flood upon the earth. They are overjoyed by the fact that God heard his people's suffering in Egypt and rescued them, but are dismayed when He threatens to destroy them a few chapters later.
On and on the list goes, until eventually they say that there are conflicting portraits of God, and that they must trust their experiences with Him. They even make a few chronocentric statements regarding some of the Old Testaments figures. My favorite one is Joshua, in which they say that he only thought he was doing God's will in exterminating the Caananites, but that really he was delusioned and had a poor conception of God. They don't judge him, however, because after all, he was just an unenlightened Israelite leader.
I also like how they will use something Christ said to support universalism, but then ignore something quite obvious like the parable of the Wedding Banquet in Matthew 22, in which verse 14 says, "Many are invited, but few are chosen,". Or how about the parable of the Sheep and the Goats in which Christ says "Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me....'Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life." (Matthew 25:41-43, 46 NIV). They also give Paul the same treatment, at one point saying he is misguided in his theology then at another point quoting him in favor of universalism.
At the end of the book there are two appendices. One has scripture that supposedly support the universalist view, the other gives a brief overview of universalism throughout history. Only the first one is of importance, because it matters not if universalism is historical, but if it is scriptural.
In conclusion, I wish I could say this book was at least worth a read: you can disagree with someone, but it is always nice to see something well defended and honestly thought. This, however, isn't.
- Lee Foster