Universalism

“What are your thoughts on universalism?”

Universalism: a doctrine whereby all people "go to Heaven when they die”.  It is a doctrine that presupposes a definition of both salvation and an afterlife.  In my personal theology, to “be saved”, to “enter the Kingdom of Heaven/God”, or any of those Christian buzz-phrases is closer in meaning “enlightenment” than anything to do with an afterlife.

I believe in the eternal soul but not necessarily in the individual ego that is attached to the soul during a physical lifetime.  Rationally, I’m more inclined to subscribe to a reincarnation of soul through multiple lifetimes with different individual egos than the usual Christian story of individual egos/souls in unchanging eternal torment or adulation of the deity.  So, “to go to Heaven when I die” has a whole different meaning for me now than it did when I was an Evangelical.  

Regardless of what happens to my individual ego after my physical death, I believe that salvation is something that happens in this lifetime.  I use salvation in its more literary connotation of a transformation from one state of perpetual darkness, closed-mindedness, psychological suffering, or selfishness, to a state of compassion, broad vision, service, and enlightenment. Will everyone be saved? That is, will everyone move from a state of selfishness and suffering to a state of compassion and service?  Clearly, one needs only to look around at how many people live and die in a state of selfishness to see that to be untrue. 

Can everyone be saved? Is there anyone for whom enlightenment and transformation is not possible? In this sense, I believe in a doctrine of universalism.  I believe everyone has an equal opportunity to be enlightened, to experience grace, to raise his consciousness.  No one who is willing to commit to the process of transformation will be denied.  Will everyone notice the many opportunities to experience grace in their day?  Of course not.  But everyone, everywhere, everyday has a thousand moments of grace, opportunities to choose compassion over selfishness, and to see manifestations of love and life in the midst of evil and destruction.

At this point, a doctrine of reincarnation becomes desirable and logical.  If one’s theology begins with a loving God creating humanity for companionship, then it is only reasonable to believe that such a God would provide endless opportunities for his eternal companions to reach a place where they can have both a knowledge of Good and Evil and the capacity not to be limited by that duality—in other words, to be able to think/feel/be like God.  A friend recently supported her Christian belief in reincarnation this way:  "if souls are forever, existing in eternity past and eternity future, why would anyone want to limit them to a single lifetime in which to understand spiritual mysteries?  That’s like having a child and then if they haven’t got life figured out by age five, you kick them to the street."

Most theories of reincarnation presuppose a continued connection between the soul and the individual ego (to a greater or lesser degree) and hinge on this very concept of many chances to “get it right” as well as the presupposition of a loving (and only loving) God.  While I have experienced in my visions the immense and total love of God, my reason still convinces me that God is more nuanced than to be only on the Love end of any polarity.  I am absolutely convinced that every conceivable duality is only a mental construct. Each pole of every duality contains and produces its opposite and that the whole meme is a sum greater than its parts.  Therefore, logically, rationally, I have to accept a God that somehow transcends moral definition of loving or fearful, even transcends a morality and somehow includes loving and fearful.  The mystery of God, in my personal theology, includes both Love and Fear yet transcends them so completely as to make such distinction all but irrelevant.  How that can be, of course, is what makes it a mystery.

But any good theologian won’t just leave it all there as mystery. It’s a cop-out. Mystery is all well and good and thoroughly Truth, but damn hard to live well.  How does one live the question of universalism?  How to live in our single known finite physical lifetime with an awareness of all humanity living in a state of potential? For that is what grace is—the moment when potential become transformative action.  How do we treat our fellow man, all our brothers and sisters in humanity, as equally owning this opportunity for enlightenment, transformation, salvation? Doctrine without praxis is useless. Faith without works is dead.

I think it requires our own “conversion experience”, a moment (or lifetime of moments) in which we become aware of grace in our own souls.  Without a sense of our own psychological or spiritual suffering and a transcendence of that suffering into compassion, we cannot see the Divine in all people. Some people refer to this shift in awareness as being able to “see with God’s eyes”.  Until we have met God within ourselves, we can never truly see God within others nor treat them accordingly with the justice and kindness they deserve.

Must this conversion experience or salvation occur within the Christian paradigm? I.e., must everyone “call upon the name of Jesus to be saved”?  Certainly there are those who preach that dogma, denying even the possibility of universalism. I think that is an unnecessarily limited reading of Christian Scripture and seems to limit ridiculously the companionship for God.  Rationally, it seems absurd:  similarly to the argument for reincarnation but on a one-lifetime-only scale, why would God create humanity for companionship but limit its possibility to a tiny fraction of the world’s population?

Again, theologians claim “the mystery of God”.  (On a side note: my experience with fundamentalist thinkers is that they will claim “mystery” whenever they come up against an irreconcilable tangent of their own doctrine rather than struggle through it.) I’m content with mystery as long as it is mystery that leads one into greater communion with the Divine and greater service of humanity.  For me, a doctrine of universalism, either through reincarnation or otherwise, makes me much more aware of grace, gives me a deeper appreciation of my God, and a wider capacity to love my fellow man.  As I see it, a doctrine of “born-again Christianity” as the only means of “salvation” lead to a sense of elitism, prejudice, and hypocrisy, and a condescension and patronization of those I considered “unsaved”. 

In my final analysis, the measure of Truth for any person is how well it encourages that person to Love God and Love Neighbor.  Regardless of how the Truth is articulated, whether in language of universalism or exclusion, if it draws the follower into a place of more Love, then it is Truth.  If, no matter how it is articulated, a doctrine causes hate and discontent among followers, then it is evil.

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I wrote this post entirely from my own meditations and contemplation of the relevant ideas.  It wasn't until I went searching for images to attach to the post that I found this article:

http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/deeper-walk/features/18208-is-jesus-the-only-way

I totally disagree with the conclusion but it raises many of the necessary questions one must consider when one contemplates universalism.  This topic is very difficult to address because it is hardly the simple question that it seems: one constantly trips over one's presuppositions and assumptions based on our increasingly limited interpretations of the Bible.  I think this article notes many of these presuppositions without even being aware of how they limit the possible conclusions.

Fear and God I: Love Equals Punishment

The more you are motivated by love, the more fearless and free your actions will be. Katherine Mansfield

There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. 

I John 4:18

Growing up, I heard this verse countless times. It was for me a measure of my holiness, although I couldn't say whether that was the interpretation preached or simply how I heard it.  Being a child tortured by fears (of the dark; of being alone, of people; of monsters, snakes, dogs, rodents; death, dying, pain, hell, God; separation, annihilation, extermination; ...), I obviously was not anything like "perfect in love".

Within the evangelical, fundamentalist paradigm of God as Judge of Sin, I had absolutely no understanding of Love.  In my world, God's love was what had condemned me.  If he didn't love me, he wouldn't care enough to punish me for the sin I had been born with. God is love. God is punishment. Punishment is fear. But fear cannot be love. A = B. A = C. C = D. But D does not equal B? Yet another place where science and mathematics are proved wrong by the Bible!

It took a baccalaureate in psychology and sociology before I realized how perverted and schizophrenic that juxtaposition of love and punishment was. (Well, that and leaving the fundagelical world where the inerrant trumps science.) I still struggle twenty-plus years later to separate love from punishment in my own head.

But at least, I finally began to value my own mystical experiences of the Divine over the interpretations of the bible I had grown up with.  When I was able to redefine both God and Love according to my divine experience rather than the bible, suddenly the inverse relationship between Love and Fear was not only understandable in theory but also in practice.  When my experience of spiritual reality and secular description of physical reality were both allowed to trump literal, inerrant biblical interpretation, all things did become possible.

I am now so past fundamentalist literal interpretation of the bible.  I wish I were over it. 

A New Old Idea

I was listening to Bill Moyers interview Karen Armstrong when she brought up a point that I had forgotten.  She mentioned it in at least one of her books, although I don't remember which one(s).  I've read nearly her entire body of work in which she repeats Big Ideas frequently, so I tend to get them confused.  Her point was one that was peripheral to her theme so it got lost in the bigger ideas and I'd forgotten it until I heard her say it again.

Here's the background: when rabbinical Judaism was developing after the razing of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 AD (effectively decimating the entire source of meaning for all Jews of the era) and Jews were struggling to reframe their identity without Temple sacrifice, the rabbis (a new type of Jewish scholar/teacher who gained prominence during this period) realized that their Scriptures were confusing, contradictory, and impossible to interpret at face value.  They needed a lens through which to interpret Scripture.

The urge to fundamental literalism was overwhelming in the face of the tremendous physical and spiritual upheaval the Jewish people faced.  History shows us time and again that the greater the experience of chaos, the stronger the fundamentalist backlash of legalism, literalism, and control, the greater the desire for security and spiritual predictability.  The Christian New Testament Gospels were also written in the midst of this catastrophic religious overhaul.

The new rabbinical scholars understood, or came to understand, the dead-end that literalist fundamentalism becomes.  The Jewish Scriptures do not present a clear and coherent God--is YHWH omniscient and omnipotent or capricious, tribal, and vicious? What exactly was the nature of the covenant that made Israel the chosen people?  It had been previously cast as Temple-based sacrificial activity.  If that is now impossible since the Romans utterly destroyed the Temple, what now does God expect?  How were the Jews to understand the meaning of their God and their nation?

So, here's Karen Armstrong's point: the rabbis decided that all of scripture must be read through the interpretation that Love trumps everything, that the primary theme of scripture and therefore God is Love.  If any individual bit of scripture seems to contradict that theme--say, that YHWH commands Israel to genocide in their takeover of Canaan--that such passages MUST be interpreted as allegory rather than history and that the allegory MUST be such that shows Love for all (gentiles included)

The implications of that  presumption are rather staggering.  Too bad Christians were so keen on separating themselves from their Jewish roots in the decades after 70 AD that they missed out on that quantum leap of faith.  The canonical gospels are filled with anti-Jewish, anti-others, sentiment.  If you are looking for it the Love is there, of course, but so are a lot of Us-Good/Them-Bad polarizations that when read literally are anything but Love.

I suggest that Christians take a step back from the rabid literalization of Christian Scripture, take a page from the Jewish history that is so very nearly our own (only fundamentalist politics of the day turned the Jesus people from a Jewish minority into a separate Christian religion).  Can we not pay mere lip service to the phrase "God is Love" but place it at the forefront of our faith?  Let us, too, read our (mostly Jewish) scripture through the interpretation of Love.  Any understanding of any passage of the bible that seems to create separation, to polarize communities, to set up hierarchies of righteousness, MUST be reinterpreted so that it promotes Love, of God, by God, to all people, at all times.