Only Universalism is Ultimately Just.

In a comment on BB’s article today on the worst book he has ever read, someone brought up the murder of Junko Furuta. Furuta was a 17 year old Japanese girl who was imprisoned, tortured and brutally killed by four teenage boys, you may have come across it before, if not I’d rather not recount the details, you can read the wikipedia page.

Such a story is a test case for the problem of evil. Often we consider the problem as a kind of logic conundrum: evil exists God is good why does God not get rid of it, and so on. But when we encounter such stories the problem is not something we ‘know’ as a problem but something we feel. The question is not a logical obstacle but an aching question of why such a thing could possibly be, and an anger at what seems like pointlessness and injustice. Perhaps the question of why is answerable, and ultimately a robust notion of theism must work the other way around. We are presented with a world where such things do exist, the question is what do our beliefs amount to both in terms of the meaning of such things and what we are to do about it.

I am fairly convinced by the case for Christian universalism. One of the criticisms often made about universalism is that it both pragmatically takes away the imperative of the gospel, and that it lacks the kind of justice that the ultimate solution of Christian salvation offers out for sin. When Rob Bell published his 2011 book Love Wins in which he seemed to declare himself a universalist, among the parodies was one that mocked the idea that God would send Hitler to heaven, something that played on the instinctive sense that such a notion of universalism would not just take away the gospel but would be palpably unjust.

Granted, Bell is not a remotely serious thinker and so was easily parodied, but of course when we consider the above story one of the things that strikes us deeply is the need for justice, for the wrongs to be righted and account to be made. The pitifully low sentences dished out for such heinous acts is one of the things that strikes many about the events, and when you raise universalism it would seem the idea that at death everyone involved entered heaven would render everything about it meaningless, even if it proposed to solve the suffering with eternal reward.

Yet no serious universalist believes this, and indeed it is important for anyone advocating it to emphasise that hell as purgation is serious, that it may not be eternal, but that we do not deny the language of God’s wrath and justice found in the bible. More to the point, it is key to emphasise that every other position within Christianity faces a worse problem: for most Protestants, for Catholics, for many in the Orthodox church, yes, the perpetrators suffer for their crimes in hell. But in this case, for all of the above, so does the victim.

Thus, a universalist can in this circumstance affirm two things. Firstly, that the perpetrators will face the justice of God, and second, that through the encompassing act of Christ God himself knew and suffered with that girl’s suffering, and that she has a place in heaven. For anyone who limits salvation to being in the one true church or being part of the elect, the wrong in such a circumstance is left unrighted, and her suffering truly is meaningless. Be it by total depravity and limited atonement or the justification of apparent free will to reject God, many broad understandings of Christian salvation make no sense of such horrific circumstance and cannot declare that God truly knew and cared for her suffering.

It is key to grasping universalism that the shift to universalising salvation is not a naive wiping over the fundamental problem of reality, it is key to allowing God to enter into every part of it, to suffer with all suffering and to make right all wrongs, to bring justice to all iniquity, raise every valley and bring every mountain low. Universalism thus grants a theology in which God is truly in all things, and that Christ’s act on the cross encircles the depths of evil into God’s redemption such that God is truly with and near to every single of the brokenhearted. For Christians, practically, while the currency of the gospel remains unchanged, it means that we are near to God and we act out our salvation when we seek to bring about a world of justice and mercy, of goodness and compassion.

It remains the case that everyone making claims about who is saved and who isn’t must tread carefully. None of us are God, and if we learn anything from passages such as Matthew 25, it is that one feature of judgement day will be surprise. Christ suggests it is those who walk with confidence in their own safety who will hear the dread words “away from me I never knew you,” and those who hang their heads in belief that never could they have done enough to please God to whom he will say “well done good and faithful servant.” Nonetheless, when we look at a view of salvation that cannot make right some of the worst of the wrongs of history, we must ask whether we are really interpreting things correctly and in the light of God’s own statement that he is near to the suffering and that he wills all to be saved.

Ultimately, all we can do is consider what we are told about who God is and what it looks like to follow him. So it is that the problem of evil may remain unsolvable as a logical problem, one of the many paradoxes of reality that exists whether we like it or not; but Christianity answers that we are implicated in it, and that to know God is to seek to have compassion for those with whom God says he has compassion, and to be near to those in whom God says he is to be found. It is only through a hope in the ultimate restoration of all things that one can affirm that sin is behovely, that all shall be well, and that all manner of thing shall be well.