Universalism – Did Jesus Believe in Hell?

by Norman Walford   10th January 2014

I had a serious shock a couple of months ago when a Christian friend of many years’ standing whom I have always held in high regard started dropping hints that he was moving in the direction of Christian Universalism—the doctrine that says that all men without exception with eventually be reconciled to God, that the penalty for sin is not everlasting.

I confronted him with the question So do you think that Jesus Christ himself believed in Universalism? and after some prevarication he replied that there

A New Beginning – Is it REALLY That Simple?

by Norman Walford
4th January 2014

28 years ago last month, I resigned my job in a respectable London hospital and headed for the ski slopes of Switzerland. I remember dire warnings from my boss that I would never get another job again, but I wasn't too worried. When you've got God on your side, you can take risks that others can't. I knew He would look after me, and so it proved. It broke a bondage in my life, and looking back it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

Now 28 years later I'm doing something similar, again back on the ski slopes of Switzerland but this time mainly to write not to ski.  Life is very short, and the older you get the shorter it looks. Like the saying goes, "No one ever lay on their deathbed and said I wish I'd spent more time working." I get a bit of correspondence back from what I write, and some of it shocks me. Yesterday I replied to someone who told me the way to get close to God is to read the bible for a minimum of four hours a day, and believe me they get much worse than that! One thing I've finally learned is that we don't get to God by trying harder, and in fact trying harder is often the surest road to becoming the ultimate Pharisee.

The Green Eyed Monster

In my last post I discussed how I was planning to experiment with moving from having one ‘church’ to having two ‘churches’. This experiment is now moving along, and I have to say that I’m pretty happy with it so far.

In midweek I go to St Gregory’s, our rather staid old Anglican-evangelical congregation with its pronounced Pharisee leanings, its ‘try harder’ theology and the Holy Spirit relegated to the role of a bit-part player. That’s OK. Our Men’s Group meet over bread, cheese, and wine to read the bible, discuss, enjoy, and generally to put a human face on our Christian existence.

On Sundays I’ve been attending the New Creation megachurch pastored by Joseph Prince in a massive auditorium with great worship, professional sound, and above all a great gospel message of grace, grace, and more grace. It’s impersonal, of course—with up to 20,000 attending every Sunday it can hardly be otherwise, but that’s OK also—that’s the flip side of that kind of organization. I can be inspired there, and I feel I can take non-Christian men and women there and guarantee that it will have an impact on them, which is important.

WHAT IS THE CHURCH? I’m approximating here!  A quick search shows the word ‘church’ 114 times in the New Testament. Many, many times it is clearly referring to the one, total, universal church.  Very often it talks of ‘the church in such-and-such a place’. And then frequently Paul and others talk of ‘churches’, plural, to describe gatherings of Christians in certain places. It’s always unfortunate when one word gets used to describe two different things, as here, as it generally leads to confusion. There’s nothing in my word-search to change my view that the word CHURCH should primarily be applied to the one, universal, bride-of-Christ, overall sum of all Christian believers, and that the other meanings are secondary to or derivative from that.

Like all the Christian life, it’s an experiment, and so far it’s going well.

Actually, as I’ve been going through this transition, it has seemed that something like scales have been falling from my eyes, as I’ve suddenly realized something which should have been self-evident to me a long time ago. That is, that we talk about this church and that church, there really is only one church in Singapore (or anywhere else for that matter) and that is the Church of Jesus Christ. There are many congregations, but there is only one Church.

That’s why I’ve put ‘church’ in quotes in the first paragraph of this article, because suddenly I find myself very uneasy about using the word to describe something that ideally would not be called a church at all. A congregation, a gathering, a fellowship of believers, whatever you want, but not a church. I’m not quite sure why it took me so long to figure this one out. Of course I’ve probably always known it but now I know it. I’ve internalized it. Now it’s obvious.

I think we just get brainwashed by the language. Everyone’s talking about this church and that church, and before long you get taken up by it and forgot just what the Church really is. It’s the bride of Christ. The one, whole, universal, worldwide Christian Church. St Gregory’s is not the bride of Christ, and New Creation is not the bride of Christ. Christ has only one bride, and that is the whole universal sum of Christian believers, the whole lot. That’s how God sees it, and if we see it any other way that that, then we are out of tune with the mind of God, failing to align ourselves properly with him, simple as that.

I think a lot of the Christians I meet in this city-state of Singapore actually understand this pretty well. They’ve grown up in a connected world where distance no longer exists. Communities are no longer defined by geography, they are defined in other ways. You don’t need to be in the same room any more. And the same is true of our Christian communities. It gets more flexible, fluid, and dynamic. Christian ministry becomes more of a resource to be mined. You go here  for this, you go there for that, you take in online preaching from the most gifted preachers from around the world. Then you can drop down the road for this overseas visiting speaker, and meantime maintain your online Christian network with friends from ten different ‘churches’ spread over a dozen countries and a few continents.

That’s the new world and the new Church in which we are living. For better or worse? Irrelevant question. It’s here, it’s the new reality and it’s not going away. So we get on and live with it.

So people are more comfortable now moving from church to church. And it’s healthy. People are taking—under the guidance of the Holy Spirit—responsibility for their lives, and that’s what God wants us to do. That’s why we have the Holy Spirit (one reason), so that we can make right and responsible judgments. So we can say, “Sure, it’s a great church in many ways, but it grates on me their talk about give, give, give all the time. Or their overbearing authoritarianism. Or their legalism or their literalism or whatever. So I moved to another and now I feel at peace.”

Of course, there’s one group of people who are often—not all of them, but many—unhappy with this new reality. That’s the church pastors.

Well, I can understand it and feel some sympathy even. In the first place these are the full time religious professionals, dependent for their livelihood often on the financial goodwill of their congregations. Movement into a more fluid kind of church structure is something that can obviously leave them feeling very, very insecure. It can require a lot of grace for a pastor to say something like, Well. . . if the preacher down the road is speaking more to your situation than is mine, then clearly you must go. Go with my blessing. A lot of grace. Particularly if you’re taking your money with you.

But that’s how it goes, and that’s how it has to go. We hear a lot about the Christian in the market-place of the world, less about the church in the Christian market place. But that’s what we have. And as with any other market place, it’s the best guarantee of quality. If you’re peddling rubbish, then sooner or later you’ll be out of business, and the ones with the higher quality wares take over. So I can understand that insecurity. I’m not sure what the real practical answer to it is. Perhaps Paul found one answer—making tents.

There’s a second and more insidious resistance by pastors to church fluidity. That’s the green-eyed monster—jealousy.

I make it my habit now, when I want to evaluate a pastor, to look at how he speaks about other churches. The great men of God (as I perceive them) were all inclusive. D.L. Moody was inclusive. Billy Graham was/is inclusive. The small men of God are exclusive. That’s the difference. An on that criterion there a lot of small men of God around here and not many great ones.

If that’s the test, then I don’t find many pastors here who pass it. Sad to say, it’s rare indeed to hear one speak a good word about another congregation. In St Gregory’s the silence is more eloquent than the words. You could attend for ten years, and you’d never even know that Christianity existed outside of Anglicanism and a very narrow circle of favored academic institutions. If you ask them you’ll get a whole string of arguments about doctrinal inaccuracies, falsehoods, heresies, etc. If you push the point and ask why, if these churches are so wrong, they seem so much more effective than ours, that’s easy. . . Well of course, if you make it that easy, dilute the gospel enough, then you’ll get that! Really?

OK, obviously we all think we’re right, and better in our belief and practice than the other. If we didn’t, then clearly we’d change our belief and practice until we did. So by definition we believe in what we’re doing. But it goes further than that. Some of it is about insecurity, which is understandable. A lot is about jealousy, which is worse. It can have green eyes, as Shakespeare told us, but it’s actually a master of disguise. It’s the great mimic. I’m running out of space and I’ve only just started! I’ll sign off with one of my favorite quotes, and continue this next time. . .

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

-H.G. Wells The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman

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One Church or Two – How Many Do I Need?

The church I attend is quite a sophisticated church, with a lot of sophisticated people in it. They tend to be quite high achievers in worldly terms, and they’re certainly not short on self-belief.  They know what they think and believe, and it’s not negotiable.

it’s a pretty mainstream evangelical church, part of a larger denomination and broadly in line with their wider thought. It just reflects the party line really. There’s nothing wild or extreme about it (perhaps that’s part of the problem)  and I can’t argue with it, that would be like arguing with a brick wall. But I have some problems with it.

I’ve noticed with most preachers  that they really only have one sermon, which is repeated, with variations, week after week. That’s certainly the case in our church, where the standard sermon can be summed up in just two words: “Try harder!”

Week after week it’s the same message. Do more! Give more! Pray more! Volunteer more! More, more, more, as if human effort can somehow build the Kingdom of God, but it can’t.

In many ways I like the church. I attend a weekly men-only meeting which is a lot less sophisticated—relaxed bible discussion over bread, cheese, and a bottle of red wine. Other than that we don’t actually do much, but we have been reading the book of Acts lately, and that’s really been making me reflect. Acts is dynamic. It’s all about, “The Holy Spirit did this,” and “The Holy Spirit did that,” while the Apostles look on with a sort of bemused amazement at what God is doing. Spectators, almost. “Try harder” doesn’t seem to come into it all.

And it disturbs me, particularly when I look at the results of our “Try harder” philosophy . . .  modest, can I say?

So what to do?

A couple of weeks ago, I accepted an invitation to attend another Singapore church. This is a big one. It has four services every Sunday with up to 5,000 people at each.  Great music. Fantastic ambience, exciting, you can feel the presence of the Spirit. And superb preaching—not just because it comes from someone who really has a natural gift for holding an audience, but also because it preaches THE GOSPEL. You know, the real one. The one in the bible, the one that the book of Acts hammers home chapter after chapter, the one that John Wesley preached. The only one that actually works. The message that God has done it all. The price has been paid. You just have to accept, relax, and let it flow. The GOOD NEWS which is what the gospel means.

So should I move across? I’ve thought about it, a lot. But I don’t think that would work. I enjoy our Men’s Group meetings, I find it exciting that we are at least trying to relate to one another in a vaguely Christian sort of way, and if we haven’t quite got the Holy Spirit the way they did in Acts, at least we catch a scent of it.

Whereas the other one . . . well, I just don’t think I could ever be a member of that kind of church. For me it’s just too big.  Too impersonal—you could be a member for 20 years and at the end of that you’d probably never have even met the pastor face to face, much less have him know your name. That’s not a criticism, just an inevitable fact of life about churches of that size. But still I love that preaching, that lifts me up instead of dragging me down.

It’s a quandary.

Then the friend who had invited me dropped me a lifeline. “Actually” she said, “I go to two churches. One to get,  one to give. I go to a smaller local church on a Saturday, and this big one on a Sunday.“ Fairly obvious really, in a way.

And I thought, why not? What’s wrong with having two churches, anyway?  A big one to have the quality, the excellence, the resources. And another thing—to have the kind of spectacle where you could take a non-Christian visitor and see them totally bowled over. Have them thinking, “Hey, I’m not sure what’s going on here exactly, but it’s definitely SOMETHING!” 

And then a second, smaller one, without the same resources, where no visitor is likely to be bowled over by the Spirit,  but perhaps with a more human, intimate feel to it, a more reflective, thoughtful atmosphere.

That way I could get the best of all worlds. It’s worth a thought, isn’t it. One to get, one to give.

So I’m thinking about it. And asking myself, why not? Where’s actually the problem? And the biggest problem of course is . . .

My pastor would freak out!

And that really is the sum total of the problem. In my dream world, he would be saying, “Norman that’s great! I know my ministry is a bit limited in many respects. It’s just great that you show the initiative to get out and explore other resources. I wish more of our congregation would do the same. Let me know what you get there—perhaps we can all learn from it.”

In my dreams! Of course in the real world that would never happen. He’s far too insecure to react that way. In reality it would be  more . . . disloyalty . . . lack of commitment . . . church-hopping . . . and so on.  Like for most pastors the idea of having to actually compete in the marketplace for clients would be, for him, a vision of total horror.   

So there’s the problem. Or is it a problem? Actually not. Not for me anyway. It may be a problem for my pastor, but that’s his problem, not mine. It’s all a question of boundaries.

I’ve discussed the question of boundaries in Christianity fairly extensively in How to Survive in the Pharisee Church. (You  can download the PDF of that from the website for free by the way, follow this link.) It’s a crucial issue. God has his self-imposed boundaries, that He sticks to rigidly. The church is expected to stay within its boundaries, and I’m supposed to defend my own boundaries, and that way we all get on a lot better.

My pastor’s insecurity comes within his boundary. That’s his problem, not mine. He has to fix it for himself. The question of whether I want to attend one church or two comes within my boundary, not his. None of his business. He’s going to try and lay guilt on me of  course; and I’m going to respond “No, none of your business!”

So that’s where I am now.  Contemplating this new two-church path. The pressures in a small self-enclosed church community can be overwhelming. With two churches rather than one, I’m hoping that perhaps the one can act as a safety valve for the other.

Unless they’re both beating you up at the same time, in which case you’ve really got a problem!

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Uncovering Spiritual Covering

One of the highlights—if I can call it that—of the legal calendar this year in Singapore has been the drawn-out trial of the senior pastor of one to  the largest churches on the island on charges of criminal breach of trust and falsification of accounts.

The amounts of money involved are mind-boggling—in US dollar terms it’s about $19,000,000. That’s $9,500,000 initially taken from the building fund to finance his wife’s singing career, and then another $9,500,000 to pay off the first $9,500,000 to try and conceal it in the accounts. That’s called the snowball effect, by the way.

I suppose I feel slightly vindicated, since in the final chapter of my book How To Survive in the Pharisee Church I had use this particular church as an example of high pressure fund-raising tactics that I had witnessed on one of my occasional visits to the Sunday morning services there.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. The legal process will take its course and eventually a verdict will emerge. There’s no point in prejudging the outcome. I want to talk about something else that I first encountered on one of my visits to that same church, which is the concept of SPIRITUAL COVERING.

I’d never heard of spiritual covering until that visit—perhaps that’s my sheltered life!—so I had to try and work out what it meant from the context.  The context was a strategy of the pastor to discourage people from leaving his church and moving to other churches. And the meaning was, as long as you stay in MY church, you have spiritual covering; whereas if you move to another church you lose that spiritual covering. As long as you stay in my church, I as pastor ‘carry the can’ for you in the eyes of God. God will recognize your sincerity and faithfulness, and so you will not be held accountable for any spiritual error you might get into as a result of my teaching. The responsibility will be mine, whereas you are ‘covered’.

If you stay, you are covered. If you leave, you are vulnerable to God’s judgment, Satan’s attacks, whatever. So better stay. That’s Spiritual Covering, a doctrine gaining some support in certain types of churches.

I can think of a lot of objections to spiritual covering, but I’ll confine to a few:

1.    Firstly, I’ve got spiritual covering already. I’m covered by the blood of Christ. I try to get my beliefs and my practices right of course, but I know that even if I don’t, in the final analysis I’m accepted and I’m forgiven. I’ve been adopted into God’s family and that’s enough. Do I need any additional covering from the church or the pastor? No I don’t, it’s sufficient.

2.    In fact there’s a rather negative, defensive posture to this concept of spiritual covering that I find disturbing. The idea that if the pastor can somehow make me ‘safe’ I no longer need to fear the anger of God if I accidentally step out of line. I was going to say it’s a bit ‘Old Testament’ except that would be to insult the Old Testament which doesn’t really seriously put forward this kind of system. I shouldn’t be asking, How can I be safe?—I’m safe already.  Rather, How can I be most effective?

3.    In fact it’s difficult to think of anything in the bible giving a precedent for this concept of spiritual covering by another human being—as opposed to the spiritual covering that comes from the atoning sacrifice of Jesus. It’s the opposite. WE are responsible for the path we follow. And if we follow a false teaching or a false pastor we are still responsible for the path we take. The Old Testament prophets are full of it, God’s anger—not with us the sheep, but with the pastors, the false prophets who lead well-meaning and sincere people onto the path of destruction thinking it to be the path to life.

4.    The New Testament may be a bit more ambivalent when it comes to ‘stepping outside’. I don’t see that as a major doctrinal issue, rather as a practical issue in a tiny first century Christian movement with effectively only one church to choose from. Stepping out of the church meant a return to paganism, leaving God behind. Today, with a multiplicity of churches available to choose from, the situation is different. There’s no parallel.

5.    Then there’s the ultimate inconsistency in the doctrine. Spiritual covering is used by pastors to protect their own congregation from attrition at the hands of neighbouring churches. It says that if you are a part of this church, then God wants you to stay a part of this church, permanently. BUT all pastors have a past. Almost without exception they’ve come from another church somewhere along the line. And if I’m not supposed to leave their church, then how come they were justified in leaving wherever it was that they came from themselves?

6.    This is certainly true of the case in point. In many ways (leaving the money side out of it) he’s done a great job. He’s probably accomplished far more by the move than he ever would have by staying. No argument about that. But—if it’s OK for him to leave that church, surely it’s OK for ME to leave HIS church! If I feel called to leave his church and start something new, why can’t he give his blessing and say, ‘Fantastic! God go with you!’. Except that . . . his church is the RIGHT church and all the others are the WRONG church. Enough of that self-deluding nonsense!

Spiritual covering—a ‘new’ doctrine from the more authoritarian segment of the Christian church? A tool used by church leaders in authoritarian, one-man-show churches to cement their own positions and shore up their authority. But not of course something that would ever happen in a ‘respectable’ church—certainly not the rather staid Anglican church that I attend. 

Or is it?

When I think about it, others may not give it a formal name or elevate it quite to a doctrine. But the underlying mentality can still be there. Witness the highly negative reaction of my own vicar when he found out I’d been attending meetings in other churches. He COULD have said, “That’s great Norman! Get out there and get some new ideas! I’m not perfect, go an listen to others, if you learn anything bring it back and let’s hear it!” COULD have said, but didn’t. What he actually said, I leave to your imagination.

Where does all this defensiveness come from? It comes from pride, and it comes from insecurity. Pride that can’t bear to contemplate than any other church somewhere might actually be ahead of mine in hearing from God (no shame in admitting that, surely?). And insecurity which, granted, can be worse if you’re a salaried church employee dependent on the success for the church for your daily bread.  But aren’t we supposed to be moving beyond that? Isn’t that the whole point?

So why not have two churches? Perhaps we should ALL have two churches. Perhaps I’ll come to that one next . . .

What is SIN anyway?

I’ve always had trouble understanding just what this word—SIN—means. It gets used often enough in church but the definitions tend to be a bit vague. It’s like, “If you don’t know what it means then by definition you must be doing it.” Here are two questions, or examples of the sorts of quandary I have sometimes found myself in . . . 

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Is God an Algorithm?

          

“Norman, what do you think about gay marriage?”

That was Linda, from across the table over dinner at the Singapore Swiss Club under a dark warm tropical night sky.

I launched into my standard answer.

“Marriage is essentially a contract. An exclusive contract between two people in which they pledge a commitment to love and respect one another, and to refrain from sexual relations with anyone else, as long as they live. It seems to me that if two people wish to enter into a contract not to have sex with anyone else, then that’s no one’s business but their own.” 

I went on to explain . . . 

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