Many religions have festivals which celebrate light overcoming darkness. Such occasions are often accompanied by the lighting of candles. They seem to speak to every culture, and appeal to people of all faiths, and of none. They are lit on birthday cakes and to mark family anniversaries when we gather happily around a source of light. It unites us. As darkness falls on the Saturday before Easter day, many Christians would normally light candles together. In church, one light would pass to another, spreading slowly and then more rapidly as more candles are lit. It’s a way of showing how the g ..read more

In this video, Rev Dr Brad Jersak explores “how we know what we know” through Plato, Plantinga, and Paul the Apostle. Growing up in Evangelicalism, he read books such as Evidence that Demands a Verdict but wasn’t satisfied. However, he explains how thanks to N.T. Wright and others, he discovered that there are more profound ways of knowing. He unpacks Simone Weil‘s insightful interpretation of Plato’s cave: Brad then unpacks Alvin Plantinga’s groundbreaking concept of “Sufficient Warrant” and how it can be applied to Christianity. He looks at Apostle Paul’s letters, in par ..read more

Here’s an 8-minute video clip and transcript of Rev Dr Robin Parry explaining the important differences between the Hebrew and Greek words “Sheol”, “Hades”, “Gehenna”, and “Tartarus”, which are translated “Hell” in many Bible translations. This was raised at Gospel Conversations’ Hope & Hell Conference. In the Old Testament, Sheol is the realm of the dead. It’s a very murkily defined place, it’s dark, there are people there but they’re not really living. They are sort of conscious but they’re not. Nobody wants to be there and they don’t worship God there. It’s a bit of a dreary view ..read more

The conclusion to the first talk is this: If we are going to be thinking about universalism and what we think about it and whether it’s true or not, we at least—and first of all—need to have a nuanced and clear understanding of what it actually is we’re thinking about. Because if we don’t have a clear idea of the idea we’re thinking about, we’re never gonna be able to think about it, obviously. The other thing that comes out of this is: I find all sorts of versions of universalism problematic and having read masses of them for this history book [A Larger Hope?, Volume 2: Universal Sal ..read more

Here is the 3-minute video clip and transcript of Robin Parry‘s response to the question of whether Christians should call themselves “Universalists”? This was raised at Gospel Conversations’ Hope & Hell Conference. As a case in point, James Relly—an eighteenth-century preacher in London—refused to call himself a “universalist”. He hated the word. So did John Murray—the pastor of the very first American Universalist Church and a follower of Relly. They hated the word “universalism” because it’s not in the Bible. Relly would always say, “I’m not a Universalist.” He thought everyone wo ..read more

Within contemporary theology and philosophy, there are lots of debates related to universalism. There are lots of issues that come up under discussion and are well worth thinking about. I don’t know the answers to all of them, by the way, but the following are the kinds of issues that would be talked about and raised. The nature of divine justice? Traditional views of hell are based on a particular view of what divine justice is. It’s the view that justice is understood in terms of retribution—the punishment must fit the crime, it should be appropriate to the crime and proportionate to t ..read more

Practical and ethical implications of hell by Tony Golsby-Smith is the basis of the following post. There is a quiet crisis creeping through the experience of faith today. For whatever reason, the modern church has put ‘hell’ right at the core of Christian faith, so whoever starts to worry about it, feels they are challenging their whole faith. This means they are in danger of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”, if they end up rejecting the ‘hell’ doctrine. Those who try to avoid thinking about the doctrine, may not leave the faith but unconscious anxiety and questions don’t go ..read more

How broad are God’s plans? Tony shares his life story: from his childhood in Fiji to becoming a teacher and then, to everyone’s surprise, a strategy consultant to some of Australia’s largest corporations. He began to see God working everywhere and this led him to ultimately discover Christ’s Cosmic Redemption—which is good news for the entire cosmos! Slides: My journey into Christ’s Cosmic Redemption—Tony Golsby-Smith ..read more

Now onto the third area of debate and this is one that does interest me. In the sixth century, there was a big ecumenical council where leaders from across the Church around the world got together and decided on various issues. If you are of the stream of Christianity that thinks that ecumenical councils are important—and I am, I think they really matter—one of the issues with this particular council is that there is an appendix. The document councils—which were all about who was Jesus—tacked onto the end an appendix with a list of curses against… Well, it didn’t say who it’s against but they ..read more

Patristics is the study of the early church fathers, not in the very first century—strictly speaking, that’s the earliest church—but normally patristic scholars look from the second century (although they’re interested in the first) up to the ninth century. It’s particularly what the early church fathers taught, what the church was like, etc. In particular, the debate has been looking at these leaders in the early church. “Gosh, some of them actually were Universalists!” Everyone knew that Origen was and so Origen tended to have a bad rap. He was generally looked down on—including by patris ..read more