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Our understanding of salvation depends on which of the following two assumptions we work with: (a) all persons are outside of Christ (i.e., “lost,” “condemned”) except those whom the Bible expressly declares will be saved (Thus, Rom. 1:18–3:20 and parallel passages become the starting point—prolegomenon—for structuring the doctrine of salvation); or (b) all persons are elect in Christ (i.e., “saved,” “justified”) except those whom the Bible expressly declares will be finally lost.

Throughout the centuries, the first premise has dominated Christian thinking. The biblical doctrine of original sin—the belief that all persons, except Jesus Christ, are children of wrath by nature, inclined to do evil, and deserving of eternal death—led many to the conclusion that all persons are outside of Christ except those whom the Bible expressly declares will be saved.

This perspective continued because its only challenge came from absolute universalists (those who teach that all persons will be saved). The church instinctively knew that such was not the overall message of Scripture, and summarily rejected that teaching (and rightly so).

Absolute universalism cannot be an option for those who acknowledge the authority of Scripture. However, in our dismissal of universalism, we have closed our eyes to the fact that many verses in the Bible speak of salvation in terms of all persons. These universalistic texts cannot be so easily ignored. Failure to acknowledge them hinders our ability to understand the good news. And yet, how do we reconcile God’s judgment with texts that imply universal salvation?

A New Starting Point

Three facts help resolve that problem: (1) the “universalistic” texts speak of actual salvation and they do so in relationship to all men; (2) some persons will be lost; and, (3) those who will be lost are those and only those who, in addition to their sin in Adam, finally persist in refusing to have God in their knowledge.

These biblical givens can be held in a tension-filled unity by recognizing that the so-called universalistic texts are not universals, but are generalizations. That is, they are universal statements that have known exceptions. In this case, we can best account for these assumptions by acknowledging the overall message of salvation as indicating all persons will be saved except those whom the Bible expressly declares will be finally lost.

This interpretation is consistent with the way God has dealt with mankind throughout history. He created man good and in a right relationship to himself. “And God blessed them” (Gen. 1:28). This blessing, together with the joy of living in God’s presence, was not something conferred upon mankind in response to, or conditioned by, obedience. However, these blessings and fellowship with God were no longer enjoyed when man refused to live in obedience to God’s revealed will. “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day you eat of it you shall die” (Gen. 2:16b–17). Mankind’s relationship to God followed this pattern: “You were blameless in your ways from the day you were created, till iniquity was found in you” (Ezek. 28:14). The blessing was unconditional, the judgment had to be earned.

Again, when establishing his covenant with Abram, God did not propose or prescribe certain conditions so that by keeping them Abram could attain a favorable status with God. “And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great so that you will be a blessing” (Gen. 12:2).

God affirmed this covenant with the entire nation of Israel at Mount Sinai. He made his will known to them and gave them the Ten Commandments. The commandments were not given so that by keeping them the Israelites could become the recipients of God’s favor. The commandments came to Israel with the assurance “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exod. 20:2).

Thus, the Israelites were the recipients of God’s blessing. But it was also true that if they willfully, persistently, and finally refused to walk in accordance with God’s revealed will, they would not experience his blessing or live in fellowship with him.

Unconditional Good News

In the light of this history, we have reason to expect that salvation would also come as an announcement of unconditional good news accompanied by a threat of judgment upon disobedience. Salvation is by grace; condemnation is by works.

The good news is that the obedience of the Second Adam has overcome all the dreadful effects of the disobedience of the first Adam except for those who finally refuse to have God in their knowledge. That is to say: All persons are elect in Christ except those whom the Scripture expressly declares will be finally lost. It may be helpful to think of this premise as a “qualified universalism.” The necessary limiting qualifications to universalism are so clearly spelled out in Scripture that I do not hesitate to call this premise “biblical universalism.”

To so view the overall message of Scripture is foreign to our way of thinking. It raises many questions. But consider the following:

1. Biblical universalism does not say we should assume that all persons are converted. We are to assume they are elect in Christ unless we have decisive and final evidence to the contrary. Their subjective salvation, their regeneration, their new birth and conversion may take place at any point in time during their earthly life.

2. Saying “All the descendants of Adam … are saved,” and allowing only for biblically declared exceptions, does not imply that all persons are initially elect in Christ but subsequently some of them are removed from this union with Christ.

Such a view would contradict the scriptural teaching of the security of those who are “in Christ,” as well as John 3:36, which says of those who disobey the Son that “the wrath of God rests upon” (Greek: ‘remains upon’) them. God’s wrath was never removed from them.

3. Biblical universalism does not deny or in the least degree compromise the scriptural teaching concerning the sin of Adam and its devastating effect upon all his descendants. Due to the sin of Adam, all persons, except Jesus Christ, are not only worthy of eternal judgment, but they will actually suffer eternal death on the basis of their sin in Adam unless the sovereign electing grace of God intervenes to rescue them from such a fate.

What has been overlooked, however, is that the electing grace of God does intervene in behalf of every person except those who willfully, personally, and finally “refuse to have God in their knowledge.”

4. Biblical universalism does not negate the need for a definite decision to accept Christ as Savior. Everyone to whom the gospel is presented must repent, believe, and begin to walk in accordance with God’s will or they will not be saved.

If we use this premise rather than the idea that all are lost, some progress could be made between Arminians and Calvinists toward a common understanding of the good news.

A New View of the Lost

To put the premise of biblical universalism into practice is to view every person, and treat him or her, as one “for whom Christ died” (1 Cor. 8:11) unless, and until, they give decisive and final evidence to the contrary. The approach of biblical universalism breaks down barriers between people. It promotes a feeling of genuine concern and mutual trust. It helps overcome prejudices that arise out of fear because we view others apathetically—or worse still, with suspicion. On this basis we are to view all persons as heirs of the kingdom of heaven; bring to them the good news of what God in Christ has done for us; exhort them to repent, believe, and obey; help them, counsel them, and, if need be, warn them to flee the wrath which is sure to come on all who disregard the witness of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Because we will not have final and decisive evidence to the contrary, we must approach all people with the perspective that “[Christ] is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). This gives us biblical warrant for regarding all persons as equal children of God. And it exhorts us to warn them that persistent refusal to accept God’s offer of salvation will be just cause for their condemnation.Neal Punt is a pastor of the Christian Reformed Church of Evergreen Park, Illinois, and author of Unconditional Good News (Eerdmans, 1980).

The CT Institute Talks To Neal Punt

What reaction did your book, Unconditional Good News, create?

It was received quite favorably, though some in my own denomination thought I was contradicting Reformed theology. In fact, the book was brought before the local church and our classis where I was grilled pretty thoroughly. Then, the full synod was asked to rule on it. In each case, it was concluded I hadn’t violated either our creeds or the Scriptures.

Were you surprised at the reaction?

Not at all. A new perspective takes a good deal of time and thought before it can be discussed intelligently. I first ran across the idea of biblical universalism in Charles Hodge’s writings, 18 years before I started writing the book. If it took me that long to feel comfortable with it, I can’t expect others to accept my ideas without question.

Some might come to the conclusion that your concept of salvation is really a form of Arminianism. How would you respond?

I’ve had Arminians criticize the book for being too Calvinistic, and Calvinists have said it’s too Arminian. That suits me just fine because it shows that maybe these two points of view have more in common than we think.

What effect did the actual writing of the book have on your pastoral ministry?

It stimulated the process of finding sermon material. If all pastors would read and study for personal edification rather than for next Sunday’s sermon, they would discover more sermon material than they could use. As I worked on the book, I felt as if I was walking in an orchard. Like trees overburdened with fruit, sermon ideas fell before me.

In light of the criticism of Unconditional Good News, are you concerned about how your next book will be received?

Not really. Basically, it is the same book rewritten for a general audience. It will undoubtedly attract more attention, but theology must be a communal work. If I’m wrong, I want to be corrected. But so far, no one has been able to refute my understanding that all are saved except those whom the Bible says are lost.

Clark Pinnock has set forth his case bluntly. For this I am grateful. His honesty may have its risks, but it would be a sad day for all of us if interpretations of Scripture such as his could not be debated publicly.

Pinnock’s case for annihilation rests on two assumptions. First, he believes that words such as death, perish, and destruction should be taken literally to mean the permanent loss of spiritual existence. His references to judgment need to be interpreted in this light (e.g., Matt. 3:10, 12; 5:22; 10:18; 25:46).

Second, Pinnock argues that annihilationism has morality on its side. It refuses to accept that God is “vindictive,” forever punishing unbelievers in his “torture chamber.” For an evangelical, however, this second argument has validity only to the extent that the first is a correct reading of Scripture. Paul, after all, can speak of unbelievers as objects of divine wrath, “prepared for destruction” (Rom. 9:22) and, without blinking, he dismisses the moral outrage that follows by asking, “who are you, O man, to talk back to God?” (Rom. 9:19). Pinnock’s expressions of moral horror, therefore, need to be heard, but then set on one side so that we can concentrate more clearly on the biblical data.

The weakness of Pinnock’s case is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in his handling of Matthew 25:46. In this text, the existence of believers and that of unbelievers are set in parallel. Both forms of existence are said to be “eternal,” the same word (aiōnion) being used in both instances. Pinnock arbitrarily claims that in the case of believers, the text is talking of eternal effects, but in the case of unbelievers, only of eternal actions. In their case, the judgment is eternal only in God’s mind and not in their experience since they do not exist; in the case of believers, “eternal” means the experience of endless life. This produces two, competing meanings, of “eternal”—all in the same verse!

This text is a microcosm of what we have throughout the New Testament. Unbelievers, no less than believers, are resurrected (John 5:28–29; cf: Dan. 12:2) so they might realize that immortality which is theirs by creation. By direct assertion and by implication, unbelievers are described as being “eternal,” and the same language is used of them as is used of believers (See 2 Thess. 1:9 and 2:16; Heb. 5:9 and 6:2; Mark 3:29; Matt. 18:8; Rev. 14:11; cf. Rev. 20:10). But if their existence is preserved by God, what do we actually know about it?

What we are told is that God will assign unbelievers to “blackest darkness,” a realm that has been “reserved for them” (2 Pet. 2:17; Jude 13). This correlates with Jesus’ own words of warning of the realm where there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matt. 8:12; 13:42, 50; 22:13; 24:51; 25:30), which would hardly be true of those who do not exist! This awesome reality was, indeed, pictured in Jesus’ mind when he viewed the garbage dump outside Jerusalem.

But even here Pinnock misses the point. What makes this reality so bad is not that people disappear forever once they are tossed in the dump, but that while they are there, “the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:44, 46, 48). And this is surely the point brought home in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man who was in the “fire” (Luke 16:19–31). To propose that the rich man’s postlife existence was but a temporary interlude before his final disappearance is to impose a meaning on the text for which there simply is no warrant. Annihilation would be instant destruction, not the “everlasting destruction” of which Paul spoke (2 Thess. 1:9; cf. Rev. 22:14) and to which Jesus here appears to refer.

But can we not read annihilation into some of the words used to describe the fate of unbelievers? The words commonly cited actually have a range of meanings and cannot be reduced to a single overly literal translation. Sinners are “cut off” (Ps. 37:9, 22, 28, 34, 38), but so was the Messiah (Dan. 9:26); sinners are “destroyed” (Ps. 143:12), but so was Israel (Hos. 13:9; cf. Isa. 9:14) and so were the sheep and coins (Luke 15:4, 8) that were then found; unbelievers are said to “die,” but then all of us have always been “dead” (Rom. 6:13; 7:4; Eph. 2:1, 5; cf. Rom. 7:10, 13; 8:2, 6; 1 Tim. 5:6; Col. 2:13; Rev. 3:1), and that surely does not mean we have been without existence and consciousness.

The theological issues that annihilationism seems to answer may, however, weigh more heavily in their appeal than the linguistic considerations. Specifically, is an everlasting punishment not disproportionate to the offense unbelievers have committed—as disproportionate, say, as a judge handing out a life imprisonment for a traffic violation? If the punishment is disproportionate, then it is unethical, and obliteration, though terrible, would at least seem moral. Might it, then, not be sufficient for God to satisfy his justice by annihilating sinners and, in so doing, also show his mercy toward them?

This solution is viable if its views of sin and of God’s character are biblical. But I am doubtful that is the case. If God is as good as the Bible says he is, if his character is as pure, if his life is as infinite, then sin is infinitely unpardonable and not merely momentarily mischievous. To be commensurate with the offense, God’s response must be correspondingly infinite. Annihilationism looks instead for a finished, finite, temporal response.

An infinite response, however, is what we see occurring at the Cross. Christ stood in the place of those whom he represented, and bore their punishment. In so doing, was he annihilated? Of course not. What we see is Christ bearing their actual punishment, and he could exhaust it because he himself was the eternal and infinite God. He did not bear a punishment merely like that which sinners deserved, one that was merely analogous to theirs.

A gospel, then, that trades on a diminished view of sin, a modified notion of divine righteousness, and a restructured Atonement is not one that is more appealing, as Pinnock thinks, but one that is less. It is a gospel that has lost its nerve because it has lost its majesty.

Pinnock has tried to revive the old argument that the judgment of God raises moral problems. I assert the opposite: God’s judgment settles all moral problems. Specifically, it addresses the question as to how God can still be powerful and just if there is evil in the world. It sees this present life as an interim period at the end of which God will publicly vindicate his character. This vindication (which cannot be “vindictive,” as Pinnock claims) will set truth forever on the throne and error forever on the scaffold. This will be the moment of final liberation and the cause of endless praise (Rev. 6:10; 11:17–19; 19:1–8).

It is both a sad and glorious fact that human beings are immortal. No one will ever be snuffed out like a spent candle. The sadness in this is inescapable. The glory of it is that people are who God has said they are: beings of surpassing worth and ineradicable dignity because they bear the divine image. And that is something our generation needs to hear.

David F. Wells is an Andrew Mutch Professor of Systematic and Historical Theology, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

One of the purposes of the Christianity Today Institute is to explore significant ideas that appear to challenge orthodox views of Scripture. One such view is annihilationism—the belief that the souls of the lost cease to exist at death rather than suffer eternal torment. Annihilationism appeals to believers who reject universalism but at the same time have difficulty reconciling God’s goodness with his judgment. It is not a new idea, but it appears to be gaining support from some evangelicals, especially those in Europe and Great Britain. To help us understand annihilationism, we asked eminent theologian Clark Pinnock of McMaster University in Toronto, Ontario, to share his current thinking on this topic. And to help us see the weaknesses of annihilationism, David Wells of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary responds to Dr. Pinnock’s article.

I agree with Roger Nicole that universal salvation is a false hope. Although I wish universalism were true, the Bible’s repeated warnings of final loss at the Great Judgment negates it. If the doctrine of hell is taken to mean (as it so often is) that God raises up the wicked to everlasting existence for the express purpose of inflicting upon them endless pain and torment, universalism will become practically irresistible in its appeal to sensitive Christians.

Let me explain. Although the tradition in this matter is not uniform, the semiofficial position of the church since approximately the sixth century has been that hell lasts forever and that human beings thrown into it are tormented endlessly. To some, this has conveyed the picture of unceasing physical burning, while to others in recent times the torment has been re-imaged in terms of mental and psychological suffering. Whatever the image, the traditional understanding of hell is unspeakably horrible. How can one imagine for a moment that the God who gave his Son to die for sinners because of his great love for them would install a torture chamber somewhere in the new creation in order to subject those who reject him to everlasting pain? It is hard enough to defend the Christian message apologetically in relation to the problem of evil and suffering without having to explain this doctrine, too.

My point is this: The popular tradition concerning the nature of punishment that some of the wicked will have to suffer is morally and scripturally flawed, and is accelerating the move toward universalism. (Surely the sheer horror of Tertullian’s picture of endless torment contributed something to Origen’s doctrine of universalist salvation.) If the only options are everlasting torment and universalism, then I would expect large numbers of sensitive Christians to choose universalism.

However, there is a third possibility: The “fire” of God’s judgment consumes the lost. According to this understanding, God does not raise the wicked in order to torture them consciously forever, but rather to declare his judgment upon the wicked and to condemn them to extinction, which is the second death (Rev. 20:11–15).

But is this view really biblical? I believe it is. Limiting ourselves to verses in Matthew’s gospel for the sake of brevity, John the Baptist speaks of the wicked as tree branches and as chaff being thrown into the fire of God’s judgment and burned up (Matt 3:10, 12). Jesus uses the Jewish term Gehenna, the fiery pit where garbage was thrown to be consumed and destroyed, and which had become a terrible symbol of the fate of the wicked (Matt. 5:22). And he makes his meaning very clear when he tells us not to fear those who can only kill the body, but rather to fear God “who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28). The dread possibility here is surely the annihilation and extinction of the whole human person subject to this judgment.

But what about the “eternal punishment” of Matthew 25:46? That is precisely what it is—not everlasting punishing, but eternal punishment. God sentences the lost to a final, irrevocable, definitive death. It is indeed an everlasting punishment. The fire of hell does not torment, but rather consumes the wicked. As Paul put it, the wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23).

But is it moral? After all, the notion of being condemned to nonexistence is pretty grim, too. Universal salvation may still seem more enticing, morally, but I cannot eliminate the dark side of divine judgment from the picture. The judgment is a terrible event because God’s wrath against obdurate sinners is serious and consuming. A biblically accurate view of salvation must acknowledge this. Nevertheless, this “capital punishment” view of the final judgment at least does not involve a deity who is endlessly vindictive, and a new creation where heaven and hell exist alongside each other forever. Final judgment is a moral necessity in God’s universe.

Where, then, did the everlasting-torment view come from, if not from a required exegesis of Scripture? I believe it arose from the unbiblical Greek view of the natural immortality of the soul. Think of it logically: If by their nature souls must exist forever, as Plato thought, and if according to Scripture they are thrown into the Gehenna of fire, the only conclusion one can come to is everlasting burning and torment. But if one thinks biblically, and sees human beings as mortal, needing to be given eternal life if they are to have it, then no such awful consequence follows. We are not required to believe in everlasting punishing.

Now the dread question: Is this belief of mine heretical? For some it is, which makes it difficult for conservative Christians to consider seriously. Given the moral horror and exegetical flimsiness of the traditional view of hell, I am not surprised that some would rather not reopen a question for which they have few answers.

And yet, the annihilationist interpretation is not altogether outside orthodox Christianity. British evangelicals such as John Wenham, Frank Guillebaud, and Basil Atkinson have all espoused this. As the pace toward accepting the error of universal salvation quickens, an honest consideration of annihilationism would be appropriate.

That Jesus saves is not disputed among true believers. Yet there are those who would suggest that only some will actually be saved (particularism), and others who say that all of humanity eventually will be saved (universalism). In theology, there are three areas in which a decision is needed between these two views. They relate respectively to the range of appeal, the intention and provision of God, and the extent of the actual attainment of salvation.

The Range Of Appeal

It should be abundantly clear that the gospel’s range of appeal is indeed universal. Jesus commissioned his followers to “make disciples of all nations” (Matt. 28:19), to “preach the gospel to all creation” (Mark 16:15), to preach “repentance and forgiveness of sins to all nations” (Luke 24:47, cf. Mark 13:10). Paul declared that “God commands all people everywhere to repent” (Acts 17:30).

The early church had difficulty accepting this design. Their Jewish background predisposed them to think that in order to be incorporated into the church of Christ one must have first been accepted within the Jewish covenant community. Yet the Book of Acts, especially in chapters 2–15, shows how the Holy Spirit guided the church to receive people of an ever-widening circle as fellow members of the body of Christ. This was anticipated in the miracle of the many languages of Pentecost, but it was articulated in the movement from Hebraic Jews to Grecian Jews (Acts 6 and 7), to Samaritans (Acts 8:1–25), to a proselyte (Acts 8:26–40), to a heathen, Cornelius, to whom God specifically directed Peter to preach (Acts 10 and 11), and to heathens who were approached without a special mandate of God (Acts 11:20–23). The council of Jerusalem approved the principle of accepting into the church any person, irrespective of background, on the basis of repentance and faith in Christ. Indeed, the transition from a particularistic call through the nation of Israel to a universalistic call is one of the significant differences between the Old Testament and the New Testament, as John Calvin aptly remarked in his Institutes.

It is not necessary to believe (as many do) that in order for God to offer a sincere, universal invitation to salvation it is necessary for him also to assure a provision that everyone will accept the invitation. In the first place, it is quite apparent from the Scripture that the scope of the call and that of the divine choice are profoundly different: “There are many called, but few chosen” (Matt. 22:14). Furthermore, the well-meant character of an offer does not depend upon the provision marshaled. Instead, it merely requires that if the terms of the offer are observed, the benefit proffered is in fact granted.

It is therefore by a flaw of logic that some advocates of definite atonement (also known as “limited atonement”) have contended that a genuine offer of the gospel can be extended only to the elect. A similar fault flaws the argument of those who hold that a universal provision is indispensable for a genuine universal offer.

The Intention And Provision Of God

Those of strictly Reformed persuasion embrace particularism, in which the purpose of Christ’s work concurs precisely with God’s elective purpose and the Holy Spirit’s saving action. The great majority of Christendom, however, adheres to the view that Christ died for the sins of the whole human race without exception. It has been customary in Reformed circles to call this position “hypothetical universalism,” because it posits a universal divine intention to save on the condition of repentance and faith. That is to say, if only human beings would repent and believe, they would be saved. In a very general way, this is the position of the Roman Catholic church, of Eastern Orthodoxy as well as its heterodox offshoots of the Lutheran church, of the Arminian movement in all its forms, of Amyraldism in Reformed circles, and of a number of individual Reformed theologians such as J. Ussher, R. Baxter, E. Polhill, E. Calamy, M. Martinius, R. Wardlaw, James Morison, A. Hovey, A. H. Strong, L. S. Chafer, N. Douty, and M. Erickson.

Those who advocate universal atonement advance passages that are construed to teach a universal saving will in God (Ezek. 18:23, 32; John 3:16; 1 Tim. 2:4; 2 Pet. 3:9). They insist that some for whom Christ died may, or even will, perish (Rom. 14:15; 1 Cor. 8:11; Heb. 10:29). And they suggest that the saving work of Christ was done for all (Isa. 53:6; Rom. 5:18; 1 Cor. 15:22); for everyone (Heb. 2:9); for “whoever” (John 3:16; Rev. 22:17); for the world (John 1:29; 2 Cor. 5:19; 1 John 2:2; 4:14).

On the other hand, the upholders of particular redemption point out that a number of these passages occur in a context that relates to people who are actually redeemed, or that the statements made do not merely affirm that Christ accomplished his work for the benefit of those mentioned, but that these actually received salvation (John 1; Rom. 5; 1 Cor. 15). Furthermore, there are passages where Christ’s specific purpose is presented as giving himself for his people (Matt. 1:21), his church (Acts 20:28), his sheep (John 10:11, 15), and his friends (John 15:13). These passages do not necessarily exclude anyone not expressly mentioned, but they are quoted to indicate the particular intent of God for those who are elect.

Many other arguments may be advanced to support the idea of particular redemption. Consider the words used to describe the work of Christ: redemption, reconciliation, propitiation. All involve the actual attainment of salvation, not merely the creation of a potential for it. Also, penal substitution, which is at the heart of the Atonement, implies all those for whom Christ died will in fact be saved, since no sin would remain to their charge. Finally, particular redemption manifests the unity of purpose between the Father who elects, the Son who redeems, and the Holy Spirit who applies salvation.

The Attainment Of Salvation

Who, then, actually will be saved? To answer, we must first determine whether evil is a permanent feature of the universe, or whether it will be completely eliminated at some future time. The latter option characterizes various forms of universalism (see chart below).

Materialism is obviously out of harmony with Scripture since it ignores the most important element in human nature: the soul (Matt. 10:28). Further, it is closed to the hope of any significant destiny beyond the grave. It is a pity that in a secularist and materialistic age like the present there are so many whose expectations do not rise above this.

Idealism makes a similar error by failing to recognize a future destiny for the human body. Here we move in the realm of Greek philosophical speculation in line with Plato’s Phaedo rather than in a biblical frame of reference. Although idealism, like Christianity, places great emphasis on spiritual realities, it is fundamentally opposed to the Christian view of humanity.

The same comment would apply to the Barthian view that the future destiny of humankind means simply that we are remembered by God, and not that we have an individual concrete existence beyond the grave. This outlook not only nullifies the resurrection (including the resurrection of Christ), but renders history insignificant, as being merely a passageway between an eternal pre-existence in the mind of God who foreknows all things, and an eternal future in his memory. It flatly contradicts passages like 1 Corinthians 15:51–53 and 1 Thessalonians 4:15–18.

There is no significant difference between conditional immortality and annihilationism regarding the destiny of those who are not redeemed: in both outlooks they cease to exist. The difference relates to the natural endowments of human nature. The conditionalists consider immortality a boon that was proffered to Adam and Eve as a reward for obedience, forfeited by their rebellion, and made available again only in Christ. Those, therefore, who are not found in Christ inevitably fall into nonexistence, either immediately at death or after a limited period of conscious punishment after death.

Annihilationists, on the other hand, would readily ascribe immortality to human nature as a constituent element. Our first parents’ sinful rebellion forfeited this endowment, so that those naturally destined to immortality are now exposed to a process of erosion and attrition culminating in nonexistence. Or again, they are reduced to nonbeing by a special act of God canceling out an existence that could only be viewed as a calamity.

Often the difference between conditionalism and annihilationism is not observed, and the two terms are commonly used as synonyms.

Here, then, are the major arguments and problems concerning the cessation of existence of the reprobates:

1. God alone has immortality (1 Tim. 1:17; 5:16). This argument, if it proves anything, proves too much, since no one wants to deny that God confers immortality on holy angels and on redeemed humanity. God alone has life and immortality in himself (John 5:26), but this does not mean that he has not conferred endless existence as a natural endowment to his rational creatures. In Scripture, death is presented as the punishment for sin (Gen. 2:17; Rom. 5:12; 1 Cor. 15:22) rather than immortality the reward for obedience.
2. Immortality is a special gift connected with redemption in Jesus Christ (Rom. 2:7; 1 Cor. 15:53–54; 2 Tim. 1:10). Granted such passages represent life and immortality as the privileged possession of the redeemed. But in these contexts, these terms do not merely connote continued existence but rather refer to existence in joyful fulfilment of the human high destiny in true fellowship with God (John 17:3).
3. Cessation of existence is implied in various Scripture terms applied to the destiny of the impenitent, such as death (Rom. 6:23), destruction (Ps. 21:10; 92:7; Matt. 7:13), and perishing (Ps. 19:9; Luke 13:3, 5; John 3:16). But these expressions do not so much imply annihilation as the complete deprivation of something essential to normal existence. Physical death does not mean that body or soul vanishes away, but rather that an abnormal separation takes place that severs their natural relationship until God’s appointed time. Spiritual death, or “the second death” (Rev. 2:11; 20:6, 14; 21:8), does not mean that the soul or personality lapses into nonexistence, but that it is ultimately and finally bereft of that presence of God and fellowship with him that is the chief end of humanity and the essential condition of worthwhile existence. To be deprived of it is to perish, to sink into abysmal futility. Likewise, an automobile is said to be wrecked, ruined, demolished, “totaled,” not only when its constituent parts have been melted or scattered away, but also when they have been so damaged and twisted that the car has become completely unserviceable.

Conditionalism is intimated in the writings of Arnobius and Lactantius. It was revived by Socinus and has flourished especially in the latter part of the nineteenth century with R. Rothe, C. Secretan, E. Petavel, E. White, C. F. Hudson, J. B. Heard, Henry Constable, and others. Among twentieth-century advocates one may list Eric Lewis, O. Cullmann, and L. E. Froom, noted for his weighty two-volume work The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers (Washington: Review and Herald, 1965–66).

These arguments, particularly in view of the reservations indicated above, do not appear sufficient to overcome the substantial weight of evidence supporting an endless conscious sorrow for the wicked. This is further apparent from biblical expressions like “fire unquenchable,” “the worm that does not die,” or “God’s wrath remains on him.” Moreover, it is hard to ignore adjectives like “everlasting” or “forever” when applied to God’s punishment of the unrepentant.

One serious difficulty for those who advocate conditional immortality resides in the fact that the resurrection of the wicked would appear not as the inevitable destiny of human beings but as a special intervention of God made in order to inflict punishment upon them.

Universalism proper envisions the actual redemption of all humans, perhaps even of all rational beings, including Satan. It contrasts sharply with the Judaism of biblical times and with the stance of the earliest church fathers. It was advocated in unmistakable terms by Origen (see p. 36), followed in this by Gregory of Nyssa, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and John Cassian. Certain Middle Ages mystics, such as John Scotus Erigena (see p. 39), Johann Tauler, Jan Van Ruysbroeck, also expressed themselves in this sense, as did Albert the Great. Several theologians in various denominations advocated a final universalism: J. H. Petersen among Lutherans, S. Huber among the Reformed, C. Chauncy among the Congregationalists, E. Winchester among the Baptists, and Archbishop Tillotson in the Church of England. Some of the fountainheads of liberal theology—Kant, Schleiermacher, and Ritschl—are to be counted here as well. In New England, John Murray of Gloucester, Maine (1741–1815), is considered the founder of the Universalist denomination. He was followed by Hosea Ballou (see below), whose influence oriented the whole movement toward Unitarianism, with which it ultimately united forces in 1961.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century there was a considerable surge of universalism, and in 1912, George T. Knight could claim that “there are more Universalists outside the denomination than inside.”

The tendency has accelerated in the twentieth century. Many flatly reject the biblical doctrine of punishment after death, while others have posited a kind of antinomy between restoration of all things and punishment (Urs von Balthasar, K. Rahner, P. Althaus, E. Brunner, K. Barth) in which the latter usually is permitted to wane in favor of the former. In the three last decades, the whole concept of salvation has been reinterpreted as relating to social, political, and economic situations on earth, (liberation theologies), and the biblical message on the after-life was “demythologized.” This is very apparent in some formulations issued by the World Council of Churches; and the presence of this ferment is also traceable in the documents of Vatican II and in the writings of theologians like H. Küng and E. Schillebeeckx.

Universalism and the Bible

Part of the appeal of universalism is its apparent scriptural support. Because of this, the concept of universal salvation has a ring of orthodoxy to it. Consider the manner in which universalists appeal to Scripture:

1. They build their case on Scriptures that are construed to teach a universal saving will of God (Ezek. 18:23, 32; John 3:16–17; 1 Tim. 2:4; 2 Pet. 3:9).
2. They use Scriptures that suggest the death of Christ had a universal intent articulated by the words world, all, everyone, and whoever.
3. They quote passages that represent the final state as one of total subservience to God: “the renewal of all things” (Matt. 19:28; Acts 3:21); “all flesh shall see the salvation of the Lord” (Isa. 40:3; 52:10; 62:2; Luke 3:6); “to bring all things in heaven and earth together under one head, even Christ” (Eph. 1:10; cf. Col. 1:20); “that every knee should bow … and every tongue confess …” (Phil. 2:10–11); “He has put everything under his feet” (1 Cor. 15:27–28); “… that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28).
4. They quote passages where death is represented as subdued in the eschaton (1 Cor. 15:26; Rev. 20:14).

These Scriptures, considered in isolation, constitute a fairly strong case, especially when combined with a deep yearning in our hearts for an ultimate abolishment of evil. We do not, however, have the luxury of dealing with any Scripture in isolation. Specifically, we must note the expressions used to denote the fate of the impenitent:

Separation from God. Death and hell can be described as separation from God for whose service we were made, and outside of whom there is nothing but futility and hopeless frustration. In referring to the unrepentant, Jesus said, “Depart from me.” Numerous references in the New Testament support the idea that those who reject Christ are “shut out of the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power” (2 Thess. 1:9).

Destruction and death. This type of language does not so much imply cessation of existence as a complete deprivation of some element essential to normal and fruitful existence. This total waste is perhaps the basis for the use of the word gehenna, the Jerusalem dump where rubbish was burned.

Fire. Beneficial to humanity when kept under control, nonetheless, fire may develop into a terrible scourge. This is perhaps the most common figurative language of Scripture to represent the torment of the damned, with references to consuming fire, everlasting burning, the lake of fire, and burning sulphur being most familiar.

From the frequency of this language, some have inferred that physical fire burns the bodies of the reprobates. While this is not strictly impossible, it appears unlikely since physical fire appears in conflict with other scriptural descriptions of hell (outer darkness, bottomless pit). Also, it appears ill-suited to resurrection bodies that might seem impervious to it. The spiritual fire, however, which consumes and sears the soul, is perhaps more terrifying and excruciating than physical burning.

Darkness (Matt. 8:12; 22:13; 25:30; Jude 6; 13). Since God is light and the source of light, it is not surprising that separation from him implies darkness forever (Matt. 8:12; Jude 13).

The worm that will not die (Isa. 66:24; Mark 9:48). This may well refer to the gnawing pains eating away at the vitals of the soul (Isa. 66:24; Mark 9:48).

Trouble, distress, torment, agony. These terms emphasize the conscious suffering of the damned, as does the word punishment (kolasis) used by Jesus (Matt. 26:46), as well as the passages where our Lord speaks of weeping, wailing, or gnashing of teeth (Matt. 8:12; 13:42, 50). The implication of consciousness is reinforced in Revelation 20:10, where we read of being “tormented day and night for ever and ever.”

Shame and everlasting contempt. This emphasizes the disgrace experienced by the lost who will now see their rebellion in its true light (Dan. 12:2; Isa. 66:24).

Everlasting chains and gloomy dungeons. Punishment for sin includes the loss of one’s potential to do as one pleases. Contrary to what many people imagine, it is the people of God who enjoy glorious liberty in obedience to God, while the sinner is detained in shameful slavery. Heaven and hell are the definitive expression of this truth.

Futility. This concept surfaces in Scripture in relation to the life that is shipwrecked away from God. “Meaningless, utterly meaningless,” says the teacher, “a chasing after the wind” (Eccles. 1:2, 14). “What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:26; Luke 9:25).

The wrath of God. A final form of biblical language must be noted in the many places relating to the damned (John 3:36; Rom. 2:5, 8; Eph. 2:3; Heb. 10:27). This expression appears more than 600 times in Scripture. The word propitiation bears emphatic witness to God’s fundamental displeasure at the sight of sin.

Though some Scripture appeals to a universalistic understanding of salvation, in the final analysis the universalist must face the more consistent scriptural treatment of a final judgment to which all humankind is summoned and which issues into a bifurcation of destiny.

The universalist faces further difficulties with passages relating to the unpardonable sin, the great chasm between the rich man and Lazarus over which no one could cross, Jesus’ statement “Where 1 go, you cannot come,” and particularly with his remark about Judas: “It would be better for him if he had not been born.” How could someone who is ultimately going to be saved be called “the son of perdition?” How can a universalist fairly deal with the many Scriptures that show that life’s decisions have everlasting and irrevocable consequences in the life to come?

Endless Punishment and God’s Love

Some approach universalism from the perspective of punishment. They argue that the endlessness of punishment is unjust because the sanction is not proportionate with the fault. But this disregards the fact that time is not a primary factor: a fault of a brief moment may well have lifelong consequences. The universalist does not sufficiently weigh the gravity of the offense in rejecting God. Furthermore, the reprobates in hell are not in a penitential mood; they continue in their senseless rebellion. In a sense, they would be worse off being exposed in all their ugliness to the full light of the presence of God than in groveling in their darkness away from him (John 3:20).

To this, however, the universalists object on the basis of God’s love. It is inconsistent with this love, they urge, to imagine that God upholds the existence of a great many rational beings, angelic and human, just to wreak vengeance upon them. In pressing this argument, the tendency is present to minimize the importance of sin. All these arguments grounded in an appeal to God’s love ignore his honor and righteousness. Love that is not accompanied by righteousness is merely sentimental weakness and has no connection with a scriptural understanding of God’s love. Here the concerns of holiness are so important that God was willing to give his only Son as a substitute “so as to be just while justifying the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:26). It is the fearful reality and the inexpressible sadness of perdition that account for the sacrifice on the cross. Where these are toned down there is inevitably an erosion of the significance of Christ’s work. In the Universalist denomination, the deity of Christ was soon jettisoned after his atoning sacrifice was downplayed.

We must remember that the very person who revealed most stunningly God’s love, our Lord Jesus Christ, is also the one who spoke most frequently and in most frightening words of the tragedy of the lost. It is dangerous to be more generous than God has revealed himself to be!

If the plight of the unbelievers is what the Bible reveals it to be, it is not an act of love to hide their fate from them. To do so further blinds them from the remedy God provided. If a person is struck with a deadly disease for which there is a known cure, it is neither wise nor loving to try and convince him that nothing is wrong.

Thinking about Hell in Heaven

But doesn’t the eternal existence of a dark spot in the universe spoil the bliss of the redeemed in heaven and of the triune God himself? How can we be happy in heaven knowing that many are suffering in hell? This objection does not sufficiently consider the heinousness of sin and of the importance of God’s honor whose majesty has been violated by our disobedience. From the vantage point of heaven and of divine holiness, the sheer ugliness of sin will be fully apparent and will undoubtedly erase remnants of natural affection that were appropriate on the earthly scene. Surely it might be tempting to envision a universe in which no trace of evil remains, and hell does constitute a dark corner in a scene that is otherwise resplendent in brightness and beauty (Rev. 21 and 22, yet consider also Rev. 22:15, 18, 19). But the great problem is not really the continuance of evil, but its existence at any point! The very nature of evil is to be irrational and absurd, whether it be in its origin, in its transmission, or in its destiny. This also applies to the doctrine of hell.

In the discussion of this topic, it must be emphasized that divine justice will be fully manifest: “The judge of all the earth will do right” (Gen. 18:25). Thus there is no one who will have a legitimate grievance against the judgment. And indeed the Bible makes it plain that there will be degrees of punishment, not in duration, but in severity (Luke 12:46, 47).

The judge is also the one who came to know humanity from the inside (Heb. 2:17; 4:15), and who in his love for humankind gave himself up in sacrifice on the cross. David was wise when in the expectation of an inpending calamity that he had brought on himself and the nation he said: “Let us fall into the hands of the Lord, for his mercy is great, but do not let me fall into the hands of men” (2 Sam. 24:14; 1 Chron. 21:13).

Evangelism and Universalism

When universalism is propounded, one of two consequences necessarily follows. Either there is salvation on this earth outside of the preaching of the gospel, or there must be a way of salvation beyond the grave for those who have not “made it” in this life. Both of these propositions are clearly unbiblical. The former makes a mockery of the Incarnation and the Cross, since it suggests salvation can be experienced apart from them. The coming of Christ and his sacrifice are turned into a dispensable luxury! The latter proposition goes counter to the biblical urgency that challenges us to decide here and now and to see our eternal destiny as sealed in terms of this life. Both of these weaknesses in universalism erode evangelistic and missionary zeal, which, in fact, has been the historic result of this interpretation.

Contrary to what universalists contend, the doctrine of hell gives us an insight into the unfathomable goodness of God. He has done whatever was needed to snatch us away from this horrifying destiny, even to the point of absorbing hell itself in our place in order to redeem us. Far from feeling superior or smug in thinking about the lostness of the reprobates, Christians should be prone to say: “There but for the grace of God go I!” This should issue into a special gratitude to God, our Savior.

Finally, those who truly believe in hell ought to refrain from any levity on this subject. The destiny of human beings created in the image of God, and who are to be confined to ultimate separation from him, is a topic of such tragic nature that our major concern ought to be showing others how to avoid this awful destiny. The thought of hell should bring tears to our eyes, and a compassionate desire to point out the only way to sure salvation.

The lost will perish indeed. But Christ died to save the lost.

Hosea Ballou

Hosea Ballou (1771–1852) was the apostle of universalism in America. The son of a Baptist preacher, he grew up in southern New Hampshire near the Vermont border. There, during Ballou’s youth, Ethan Allen led his Green Mountain Boys against the British and against unscrupulous speculators who tried to unseat settlers from hard-won farms.

But not only did Allen campaign against distant monarchs and present scoundrels with an army, but he also attacked the Bible and Calvinism with his pen. In Reason the Only Oracle of Man, a rambling book of homespun theology, Allen dismissed the authority of the church, rejected the ideas that God predestines people, answers prayer, or performs miracles, and scorned the Bible’s claim to be God’s Word. Young Ballou read these attacks and listened to a farmer named Caleb Rich who said all men would be saved.

Ballou had been raised to believe that before the foundation of the world, God had consigned a large portion of the human race to everlasting damnation. He had been taught to assume he was one of the reprobate unless he experienced a soul-wrenching, supernatural conversion that he was powerless to influence. However, something in Ballou rebelled against this idea. How could a good God irresistibly predestine much of humanity to perdition? Reading Allen convinced him Calvinism was not reasonable; reading the Bible convinced him Calvinism was not true.

Trusting his own reason and his own reading of the Bible, at the age of 20 Hosea Ballou began preaching universalism. He was at first thoroughly orthodox in every matter except for his optimism about the ultimate fate of humanity. But as he rode over the New England hills, studying his Bible while his horse found the way, Ballou began to doubt such theological constructions as original sin, vicarious atonement, and the Trinity. The more he pondered, the more he came to believe that these doctrines were simply human dogmas, repellent to reason and unsupported by Holy Scripture. He even reached the conclusion that Christ’s divinity was merely a creation of the early church. Thus Ballou was preaching unitarianism 20 years before the denomination was formally organized. His reasoning convinced most of the 20 other universalist preachers of his day, and shaped the thought of the growing denomination.

Ballou crisscrossed the New England hills like a Yankee trader, preaching the universalistic message. Where he could not go in person he went through his books, Treatise on the Atonement and Examination of the Doctrine of Future Retribution, his hymns, and his students. He offered people an optimistic belief that relied on the Bible interpreted by common sense, stressed all humanity’s equality before God and freed people from awaiting a supernatural conversion experience. Those who bought his doctrinal goods were usually Yankees like him—shrewd and independent farmers who lived by their wits and who mistrusted the convolutions of the establishment’s orthodox theology.

Meanwhile, down in Boston, wealthy intellectuals were coming to the same conclusions, thereby foreshadowing today’s union of the Unitarian and Universalist denominations.

Origen

Origen (185–254) was the church’s version of the little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead: when he was good he was very, very good, but when he was bad he was horrid. Georgios Scholarios, patriarch of the Eastern Church in the fifteenth century, tells us that the Western churchmen said, “Where Origen was good, no one was better; where he was bad, no one was worse,” and that the Eastern theologians admitted, “Origen is the whetstone of us all, [but] he is the fount of foul doctrines.” Scholarios himself adds, “Both are right. He splendidly defended Christianity, wonderfully expounded Scripture, and wrote a noble exhortation to martyrdom. But he was also the father of Arianism, and, worst of all, said that hell-fire will not last forever.”

As a teenager, Origen wanted to be a martyr. When he learned his father had been taken away to be killed, Origen told his mother that he was going to join him in prison. (In order to keep her son in the house, his mother hid his clothes.)

The persecution that eventually killed his father also emptied the local catechetical school of all its teachers, so at age 18 Origen assumed its leadership. Knowing that he would be teaching women as well as men, and wishing to obey his Lord’s commands without reserve, he castrated himself in order to remove all sexual temptation.

He soon devoted himself entirely to writing. He was called “The Ironman,” perhaps because of his ability to keep working while he exhausted seven shifts of secretaries each day. He prepared the first critical edition of the Old Testament, wrote ten books of biblical commentary, prepared homilies on the entire Scripture, authored numerous practical and apologetic works, and published the church’s first work of systematic theology.

Three beliefs are central to Origen’s theology, all of which, when taken to their logical conclusion, got him into trouble as a universalist: God is good, God is just, and God is powerful. So good is God, said Origen, that he wishes all beings, even the Devil, to be saved. So just is he that all thinking beings have free will. So powerful is he that he fully accomplishes his purpose. Origen taught that God’s punishment lasts only until it has accomplished its purpose and persuaded the sinner to repent. Thus, without violating the free will of the creature, God eventually will bring all beings back to himself. When he fulfills his plan, the world will end. The only catch is that because of eternal free will, Satan may fall away again, starting the whole process of redemption over.

The quantity and quality of Origen’s work soon brought him to the attention of the whole Christian world. Rome banned him as a heretic, but Antioch honored him. When persecution once again broke out, he was taken to prison and tortured. When his tormentors discovered they could break his body but not his spirit, they sent him home to die. Origen longed to be clothed with the martyr’s white robe, but was denied this honor by the lack of mundane apparel.

As the church’s first systematic theologian, Origen had to patch up the holes in early biblical theology. Like one building a road through untamed territory, he sometimes used rubble to fill in the gaps. As with all pioneer construction, we should not condemn it for its imperfection but marvel that it was done at all.

John Scotus Erigena

Origen’s teaching that all free moral agents—angels, men, and devils—will ultimately be saved was formally condemned at the Council of Constantinople in 543 and was not explicitly advocated by anyone in the church for almost a thousand years. But in the ninth century, John Scotus Erigena (810–77) taught a version of eschatology that could easily be considered universalistic.

Erigena, born and educated in Ireland, was one of the few men in the West to master the Greek language. He worked as a translator when he moved to France to serve in the court of Charles the Bald. He not only translated the Greek Fathers into Latin, he also wrote commentaries on their works, along with commentaries on John’s gospel and on Boethius.

Erigena’s learning induced the bishop of Rheims to ask him to answer Gottschalk, a monk who was teaching an extreme form of double predestination, saying not only that God elects some to eternal bliss and others to eternal punishment, but also that God foreordains every human action. Erigena agreed to the task, and produced an antidote to Gottschalk’s doctrine that the bishop found worse than the poison.

The bishop liked Erigena’s criticism of Gottschalk as ignorant and heretical. He also found perfectly orthodox the assertion that since God is one, his will must also be one, and therefore there is only one predestination. What the good bishop could not countenance, however, was Erigena’s conclusion that God predestines all men to salvation.

Having displeased the bishop with his first attempt at polemical theology, Erigena returned to his work as a translator. His sovereign requested him to translate works that were thought to be written by Paul’s Athenian convert, Dionysius the Areopagite, but that in reality were the composition of a sixth-century Neoplatonist theologian. Thus, under the influence of Pseudo-Dionysius, Erigena’s thinking began to approach pantheism.

His most important work, De Divisione Naturae, argues that all things come from God and that all things will return to God so that, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:28, “God will be all in all.” According to Erigena, everything in the created world will be reconciled to God, and united to his nature. When asked how he could reconcile this universalism with the Scripture’s plain teaching of eternal punishment for the wicked, he answered that the wicked will be punished through all eternity by having their desire to be wicked frustrated.

Erigena’s theology was almost universally rejected, but his translations reintroduced Greek thought to the West during the Dark Ages, and the questions he raised continue to be posed in Christian theology.

Historical vignettes by Charles E. White, assistant professor of Christian thought and history at Spring Arbor College and author of The Beauty of Holiness (Zondenvan).

In a recent issue, Newsweek magazine took a deprecatory look at “Rambo Christianity”—fiery fundamentalists who call down wrath on sinners in high places. It seems that when a judge or legislator obstructs the kingdom, certain preachers beseech the Lord to cast down these Babylonian functionaries. To Newsweek, the practice is injudicious and outdated at best: “‘Vengeance is mine,’ says the Lord in the Bible, and some preachers even try to help the process along.… This seems inappropriate for Christian clergy today.”

If the issue were simply that Christians should bless rather than curse, Newsweek would have something. But I suspect the real sticking point is not the prayers of the preachers but the wrath of God. If so, Newsweek’s discomfiture should come as no surprise.

What is surprising is that Christians are equally uneasy with God’s wrath. It is hardly mentioned in our churches and our literature, and that fact ought to concern us. God’s wrath is a central piece in the biblical jigsaw puzzle; if we have made the other pieces fit without it, doesn’t that suggest we have forced them into a pattern God never intended?

A God Without Wrath

Fifty years ago, H. Richard Niebuhr accused the social-gospel movement of misrepresenting the Christian message: “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” Theologians had reduced and revised the gospel to make it conform to nineteenth-century optimism. One hopes no evangelical would want to be caught doing that same today.

But once we have given up wrath, can sin, judgment, or the Cross be far behind? Without the one, the others lose their meaning. Wrath measures sin, produces judgment, and necessitates the Cross. Once we have abandoned wrath, the whole Bible becomes unintelligible.

Yet this is what many of us have done. A few months ago, a colleague and I were discussing the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. She said, “Well, if that’s the way God really is, then I’m not going to believe in him.” That’s strange logic. Yet here we have the quintessential act of rebellion. We make ourselves the final judge, and in that capacity rule all evidence to the contrary inadmissible.

Yet if God is God, his sovereign will wins out even here. The repudiation of the wrath of God is the wrath of God. Running from it means racing toward it. Hiding from it means being found by it. And as the prodigal son discovered, returning to our Father’s strict justice means encountering his infinite mercy. For it is when I say, “I am not worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men,” that God says, “Enter into the joy of your Master.”

As biblical themes go, God’s anger is quite pervasive. We find it in the Old Testament, of course: “This is what the Lord says, ‘Your wound is incurable, your sore beyond healing.… I have struck you as an enemy would and punished you as would the cruel” (Jer. 30:12, 14, NIV). But judgment appears with equal fury in the New Testament: “He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power” (2 Thess. 1:8–9, NIV).

As members of Christ’s body, we are like feet and hands that have fallen asleep. We cannot support the weight of a biblical world view; we cannot do the work of Christian discipleship. We need to return to the whole counsel of God to be roused from our slumbers.

God’s Perspective

I remember going to Idaho one summer to visit my cousins. One Saturday we went to a public swimming pool, which featured what had to be the world’s highest diving platform. “Come on,” they said. I looked up. It didn’t seem so high. So I stood in line, climbed the ladder, walked out to the edge—and nearly died! It was too far down! Very humiliated, I climbed back down, having learned a very important theological truth: How it looks from below only matters if you are planning on staying below.

God’s standards are like that. They do not seem that lofty—from below. How could God send anyone to hell? We are not far enough below him to deserve it. But this is a delusion. We have fallen infinitely short of what he requires. So it is not a question of sending anyone to hell, but of letting us stay at an infinite removal. We have a hard time recognizing this because, in our sin, we have rejected God, and thus forfeited our ultimate reference point.

Spiritual awakenings have always emphasized God’s jealous rage. We often treat this as an unfortunate coincidence—as though the Holy Spirit brought new life but the preachers misrepresented it. Surely hearts that are being strangely warmed ought to be encouraged with an upbeat emphasis on love, mercy, and forgiveness.

But a revival without wrath would be pointless—like a sewing machine without a needle. It would not penetrate into the fabric of our lives, which is to say it would not revive. Sleepers may have a “God” who loves but never reproaches—who lifts up but never casts down. But an awakening would arouse us to who God really is. All of who he is: the tender love, but also the fierce majesty; the mercy, but also the unbending righteousness. During such a time, God would make heaven real—along with its alternative. Heaven and hell may not be prominent realities from our perspective. But it is how they look from above that really matters.

During a revival, judgment is not preached to provoke repentance, but rather to explain it. No one can motivate a heartfelt return to God by talking about fire and brimstone. That would pre-empt the work of the Holy Spirit. But neither can we illumine a return to God without the fire, the brimstone, the fierce rage, and the infinite love standing behind infinite disapproval.

This is because God reveals our predicament as he overcomes it; he wounds as he heals. God is the unseen claimant whose presence unseals the same breach it closes. Here we find an antidote to the modern tendency to think of God as every sinner’s sentimental reassurance: God’s love relieves the terror his anger elicits.

This is why a sense of that anger is a necessary ingredient in spiritual renewal. To wake up in this particular sense means to see that God has come down to save us—not merely from ourselves, or from each other, or from the world. He has reached down in Jesus Christ to save us from himself.

Love Has Conditions

No one has ever liked the idea that God gets angry. But modern believers suffer from confusing notions unique to this century. One of the most pervasive is the concept of “unconditional love”: the idea that God accepts everyone—period—no matter what a person does. This falsehood has to be seen for what it is, a refrain in the lullaby that has put us to sleep. God’s love is not unconditional. It is conditioned by all sorts of things—his integrity, for instance.

Recently I ran across a letter in a Christian periodical. The author was a hom*osexual seminary student. Its plea went something like this. “God accepts me as I am. I accept myself. Why won’t the church? Why does the church say ‘No’ where God gives an unconditional ‘Yes’?” This student has obviously learned his theology all too well. He is simply asking us to practice what we preach. If we decide we cannot, perhaps we should change our preaching.

Preachers of an earlier era reassured their listeners that the wrath of God was conditioned by his love. It falls to us to assert that the latter is conditioned by the former. Not that the two are equal. The yes governs the no; in Jesus Christ, it overcomes the no. Yet if we fail to give the negative word its due, our “gospel” cannot separate sinners from their sin.

God asks more than that I simply believe I am accepted. He challenges me to repent and believe. If I have not repented, I probably have not started believing, either.

In fact, the church has been able to preach unconditional acceptance only so long as the morality of previous generations has continued its influence. A sense of the wrongness of sin does not die out overnight just because the good sense of some theologians has. For a while, people have continued to be convicted of their sinfulness even though the preachers have stopped arguing that God is offended by it.

But how long can this continue? One generation may not need to hear about God’s wrath, but if it does not, this guarantees that its children surely will. We need the word of the justice, as well as the mercy, of God to put us in touch with our unacknowledged pangs of conscience.

Repentance and Wrath

Many years ago, I was a counselor for a cabin of junior highers. One night, as I lay dead asleep, a dim awareness crept into the shadowy corners of my mind: there were ants crawling all over my body. I didn’t want to wake up; I was too tired to deal with a problem that serious, so I denied it. “You’re only a dream. Please be a dream!” How long I fought the truth, I do not know. Finally, the ants woke me up enough to realize that preferring them away was not going to work. I leaped out of bed, dashed down to the shower house, and washed the little marauders down the drain. After my midnight baptism, I marveled that I had not been bitten once, when I might well have been “eaten alive.”

Grace puts us in a position like that: safe, but shaken to the core. So let’s be blunt. Those who have never returned to God in a panic like my run to the shower house may still be asleep. We put off repenting because we do not like the awful truth that our sin deserves damnation. Jesus Christ was quite serious: “Unless you repent, you too will all perish” (Luke 13:3, NIV).

We try to ignore our apprehensive apprehension of God. But there is no ignoring God, only rejecting his mercy, which means sleeping in his vengeance. We have been making our beds in Sheol. No one wants to wake up and face that. But God in his mercy stirs some. Suppose, however, that we teach these newly roused believers that God loves them, forgives them, and has nothing but positive regard for them—period. They have not heard about wrath. We have not helped them locate the corners of their hearts that still resist the advance of grace. And that is precisely what they need: help in understanding their predicament so they can appreciate the offer they are in the process of receiving.

Time to Wake Up!

As a Presbyterian, I have to confess our mainline denominations went to sleep a generation ago. At the time, we were strong and confident—perhaps overconfident. We awaken now rather like Samson, our former strength cut short. According to theologian Thomas Oden, the church has never seen a generation to match this one for beginning with so much and ending with so little. In fact, we have been dozing for so long that Rip Van Winkle ties with Samson as the most fitting analogue. We awaken to a world drastically changed: liberty eroded, morality dethroned, decency repudiated, common sense ignored, minds glazed over, hearts hardened. And worst of all, our doctrine of God is precisely that: ours.

We can believe in a “God” acceptable to culture, a “God” of all-accepting, morally indifferent, unconditional love, or we can repent and believe in the God of the Old and New Testaments. But we cannot do both. They are incompatible. It is time to awaken, to strengthen what remains, and to reopen our eyes to what the Bible actually says.

We are like servants left in charge of our master’s house. We ought to render our service faithfully and fearfully as though each day were our last. For suppose it is? “Do not let him find you sleeping” (Mark 13:36).

William Eisenhower is pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Hollister, California. He holds the Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, and has written for Christianity Today and The Wittenburg Door.

By all accounts, 15-year-old Don Nelson seemed a typical teenager. Thus, no one knows for sure why, on April 14, 1985, he shot himself with his father’s gun. There are only clues, guesses.

None of the social factors suicide experts point to—family breakdown, mobility, drug or alcohol abuse—applied to the Nelsons, a close-knit family living in a quiet neighborhood outside Iowa City. Married for 25 years, Jack and Beth Nelson lived in the same house all of Don’s brief life, a roomy ranch house Jack built when there was nothing around but cornfields.

“Don had plenty of friends. Neighborhood kids were always here,” his family says. Just hours before he took his life, he helped a neighbor till his garden. His death seemed so sudden.

Don Nelson’s tragic death is yet one more statistic to be added to the nearly 6,000 teen suicides reported yearly in the United States. As many as two million people between the ages of 13 and 19 will attempt suicide each year, according to Dr. Seymour Perlin, board chairman of the National Youth Suicide Center in Washington, D.C.

“The actual suicide rate is much higher than 6,000 per year,” claims Mitch Anthony, executive director of the National Suicide Help Center in Rochester, Minnesota. “I would estimate it at more like 20,000. This is because many accidents—currently the leading cause of death among teenagers—are really suicides that are reported as accidents. I know of a woman whose son hung himself. Even as he hung by the rope, the police officer asked her if she wanted him to report it as an accident. I have interviewed funeral directors who have confirmed that many so-called accidents were really suicides.”

Besides the actual numbers, the rate of increase is alarming. Between 1950 and 1977, the suicide rate among adolescents quadrupled for males and almost doubled for females. Overall, suicide in adolescents has tripled in the last ten years and is most likely the leading cause of death among young people.

Nor are Christians immune. Says one youth pastor in an evangelical church: “Out of the 30 kids in my youth group, I counsel about 3 or 4 a year who are suicidal.” It is not always the kids who have obvious problems who become suicidal, either. Says the same youth pastor: “One of the girls who confessed to being suicidal was looked up to by all the other kids in the group as being ‘perfect’.”

Some Christian teenagers, whose faith is just beginning to solidify, may be even more susceptible to suicidal thoughts than unbelievers, says Tom Burklow, director of Pastoral Counseling Services (a division of Youth for Christ) in Wayne, New Jersey. “Christian kids may feel like they want to be in heaven with Jesus or with a loved one who died. Or their sensitized consciences may lead them to feel so bad about themselves because of their sins that they begin to believe they deserve to die.”

Pressure Points

What makes a Don Nelson four times more likely to kill himself in 1986 than in 1955? The reasons are complex. Experts point to a number of social factors: the breakdown of the family, drug and alcohol abuse, and increased influence of the mass media (some rock songs, such as AC/DC’s “Shoot to Kill,” actually encourage suicide; and suicide is sometimes romanticized when it is dramatized on television and in the press).

The Suicide Help Center’s Anthony points to another change that the news media often ignore: increasing sexual activity at ever-younger ages. “When a teenager breaks up with someone he or she was sexually involved with, it’s like divorce. Divorce is hard enough for adults to handle; for kids it can be devastating.”

Such cultural changes have tremendously increased the upheaval of growing-up years—years traditionally characterized anyway by emotional, social, intellectual, and spiritual instability.

Can’t Handle the Pain

“Looking back, we can see that Don became too involved with Susan,” says Beth. “He wouldn’t talk about his relationship with Susan—it was very private,” says Don’s sister Joyce. “But that’s normal for that age,” she adds. “We didn’t think anything of it.”

Don’s girlfriend, the youngest daughter of a Plymouth Brethren family who lived not far from the Nelsons, is a year older than Don. Susan and Don met when she was a freshman in high school. During the first summer of their romance, Susan’s parents were away for three weeks. “We got real close,” she says. “We could talk about anything.” The closeness didn’t last. There were jealousy, fits of temper, and breakups that lasted a day.

One Saturday, Don and Susan had another fight, and the next day Don called her. “He was in a dreary mood,” she remembers. “I had to get off the phone to get ready for church. Later he called me at my sister’s. I told him, ‘Don, this isn’t working out. I think we’d better break up.’

“He said, ‘My whole life is you. I don’t want to live without you.’ Don dared me to hang up on him. He said, ‘You’ll be sorry if you do,’ and ‘quit trying to forget about me because it won’t work.’ Finally I did hang up on him—after he said, ‘You’d better buy a dress, because the next time you see me you’ll be wearing it.’ ”

Don kept his word.

“The issue isn’t pressure so much as the fact that kids aren’t learning coping skills,” says Ron Hutchcraft, executive director of Metro New York Youth for Christ. “Many, many kids these days don’t have role models for handling pain. So they may take a drug or alcohol to sedate the pain—or they might try suicide, the ultimate sedative. If they are protected from handling the painful consequences of their actions, they don’t learn how to stand up to pressure.”

Lacking those coping skills, many teenagers see suicide as an option. In one study, 34 percent of teenagers said they “seriously considered” suicide; 32 percent said they had made plans; and 14 percent said they had made an attempt. Another study found 20 percent of teens claimed they were “empty, confused, and would rather die than live.” A survey of high school and college students asked the question, “Do you ever think suicide among young people is an option?” Forty-nine percent said yes.

Though suicidal adolescents come from all socioeconomic levels, they all show certain behavioral characteristics that a discerning adult can see and recognize: they often lack problem-solving or coping skills; they exhibit tunnel vision when asked to examine alternatives to problems (drugs or suicide seem like the “only” solutions).

Those who are successfully working to prevent teenage suicide, therefore, attack it by teaching young people positive ways to cope with problems. “Programs that merely teach teens facts about suicide are more destructive than helpful,” says Anthony. Talking about suicide publicly always carries the subtle danger that it makes suicide seem like an option. “I tell kids bluntly, ‘Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. It’s like cutting off your leg because your little toe hurts.’ ”

Joy Johnson, associate professor at the University of Illinois School of Social Work in Chicago, agrees with Anthony. In her private practice, she has treated many suicidal youth. “I don’t believe in anything that gives kids the message that suicide is an option. I will talk with them forever about how awful they feel, about how they feel they’ve been ripped off. But I won’t get into an argument with them about how much they have to live for. Because if they disagree with me on that point, it will seem to them that killing themselves is an option. Instead, I tell kids that suicide is an act of hostility and an act of cowardice. I tell them directly, ‘I didn’t know you were such a chicken.’ Kids will do anything to avoid being called a chicken.”

Both Anthony and Johnson advocate a therapeutic milieu in schools and churches, an atmosphere in which everyone watches out for one another. “It doesn’t really help for anyone to try to figure out if a person is really suicidal,” says Johnson. “What does help is when everyone watches out for the kids who are hurting, who are undergoing stress. And getting those kids some kind of help, whether it’s a stress support group in which they can talk over problems and feelings with friends or a professional counselor.”

Such a therapeutic milieu is especially important when there is an actual suicide, since one suicide or suicide attempt will often set off a chain reaction.

Too Subtle

Don’s mother finds it hard to believe that he once attempted suicide by cutting his arms without her knowing. But many times a suicide attempt is unnoticed by the family. The clues are so subtle that it is difficult to distinguish them from the normal ups and downs of adolescence.

“The last few weeks before the incident, Don was pretty grouchy and a little down,” his mother remembers. “I thought it had to do with his sinus and stomach problems. In fact, on Friday, two days before the incident, he said, ‘Mom, I wish I started to feel better.’ I told him, ‘Monday we’ll go to the doctor.’ ” But Monday never came for Don.

“Most families will say, ‘It was so impulsive, so sudden, there were no warning signs,’ ” says Anthony. “But when I list the warning signs, and ask, ‘Did the person eat or sleep too much, or too little? did the person become withdrawn? was there a marked personality difference?’—then they can look back in retrospect and say, ‘I guess there were some warning signs.’ ” Parents are often the last to know what is going on.

Thus, pastors, parents, teachers, and other concerned people should watch out for young people who are in these high risk categories:

• Those who have gone through, or are going through, a family crisis. About 71 percent of young people who attempt suicide are from broken homes. Close to 75 percent of teens from broken homes reported, when questioned in one study, that they felt guilty and responsible for the divorce. Divorce can be a stimulus to a suicide attempt because a child may feel that if he were “out of the way,” things just might work out. Of the 29 percent of suicide attempters who come from unbroken homes, many are living in very troubled family situations.
• Those who have abused drugs or alcohol themselves or witnessed substance abuse in their families. In over 50 percent of suicides or suicide attempts, drugs are either part of the person’s history or part of the actual attempt.
• Those who have been abused physically, sexually, verbally, or through neglect. Although no statistics are available, counselors and researchers comment on the especially high correlation between teenage girls who have been sexually abused and those attempting or contemplating suicide.
• Those teens who are not living at home with their natural parents. “Over and over again, I hear from kids who have been sent to live in a foster home or with a relative, ‘My family would be better off without me—look, they got rid of me,’ ” says Mitch Anthony.
• Those who have had a significant loss or are facing the anniversary of a significant loss (death, divorce, breakup of a romance—especially when there has been sexual involvement—or family bankruptcy). Any loss of relationship or a major blow to the ego can precipitate a crisis. The key question to ask is “What does this loss mean to the person?”
• Those who have previously attempted suicide. Four out of five young people who kill themselves this year will have attempted suicide before. (Of course, we do not always know about previous attempts. One girl reported, “I took some pills and got real sick. I didn’t tell anyone. My parents and everyone at school thought I just had the flu.”) About 12 percent of those who attempt suicide this year will try again and succeed within two years. “The main thing,” says Joy Johnson, “is to prevent that first attempt. We know now that if we can get a kid who is temporarily suicidal not to make that first attempt, the likelihood is we can keep that person alive.” A suicide attempt should always be regarded as a serious cry for help.
• Those who have a history of suicide among family or friends. This is probably due more to negative role modeling than to genetics, says Steve Lansing, director of counseling at the National Suicide Help Center. When suicide becomes the way a significant other deals with stress, it can seem like an option to a troubled teen.
• Those who feel pressure to excel. The pressure may be external—parents who push kids to succeed, often beyond their abilities. Or it can be internal—teens who are perfectionistic and highly self-critical. This indicator occurs most often in the keen, intellectual, articulate achiever. (It may also be the most prevalent among Christian young people, when knowledge of God’s standards and a sense of their own sinfulness become distorted.) Despite this type’s successes, they never feel life is satisfying because things do not measure up to their own standards. (Such a person may have trouble accepting that only God is perfect and that human beings will make mistakes.) When people seem to hate themselves for making mistakes, steps should be taken to help them set realistic goals and cope with disappointment and failure.

Afraid to Act

“Don would scare me sometimes,” says Susan. “He wouldn’t say much, just get this look on his face and clench his jaw. Maybe slam a locker. Or get on his moped or a friend’s motorcycle and drive as fast as he could.”

Susan remembers that the last couple of months were very rocky. “One day he showed me his arms, where he’d cut himself up. I asked him why he did that. Didn’t he know I cared? He just said he was angry. He wouldn’t say about what. I was scared. I didn’t know what to do or say. I told him not to hurt himself. Another time he told me, ‘One night I stood in front of a mirror with a gun.’

“I was telling him that we couldn’t work out together. He was telling me he couldn’t live without me.” Susan didn’t know what to say, so she just let it slide.

Friends and family members who spot suicidal signs should not be afraid of confronting the person, says Mitch Anthony. “Trust your intuition. People who are suicidal want to be rescued. They don’t really want to die; they just don’t know how to keep living with all that pain. Another person can help them deal with the pain.”

“Most teenagers who plan a suicide attempt want to be stopped,” agrees Tom Burklow. “And they will appoint someone to discover their intentions and save them.

“Virtually every suicidal person I’ve dealt with is ambivalent,” Burklow continues. “One part of the person wants to live; another part wants to die. In intervention, you want to try to tip the balance toward choosing life.”

In confronting a troubled person, don’t be afraid to be direct, says Anthony. “Say, ‘I’ve noticed that you’ve seemed troubled lately. Let’s talk about it.’ At some point you can ask, ‘Have you ever thought of suicide?’ ” Normalizing thoughts of suicide will often relieve the person’s anxiety and actually diminish his or her compulsion to act. “Point out that it is common for people to feel so helpless and hopeless sometimes that they think about ending their lives. But that doesn’t mean you have to act on it. Most of us have thought that at one time or another.”

The next step is to distinguish between suicidal thought and suicidal intent. To determine intent, ask, “How were you thinking of killing yourself?” State the question this way, rather than “How are you thinking of doing it?” By using the past tense you communicate that you and the person are going to move past thoughts of suicide to positive answers.

The person’s answer to that question will indicate the degree of intent. The more developed the plan, the higher the degree of risk.

The final question Anthony advises posing in an intervention is: “Are you seriously contemplating suicide right now?” By asking this question you will find that some have moved past this way of thinking, others are just beginning to reach this mindset, and still others are locked in the middle.

A Job for a Professional

“It’s important to get a suicidal person to a professional who knows how to make an assessment and who can work with such a person,” says Joy Johnson. “It’s important not to try to do too much on your own.” One woman tells how her 17-year-old son told six people, including the parents of his girlfriend, that he was thinking of killing himself. They thought they talked him out of it and he would be okay. But six days before his eighteenth birthday and his high school graduation he hung himself.

A very effective preventive program Joy Johnson uses is called networking, and can be initiated by any parent or concerned adult and incorporated into any church or school program. “If I know about a person who is suicidal, I will find five adults who care whether that person lives or dies. I will say to them, ‘It is my judgment that Barbara is in danger of hurting herself and needs to have someone with her at all times.’ ” Those five people will rearrange their schedules to take turns to be with Barbara so that for the next four days someone is always within eight feet of her.

This action does two powerful things. First, it is a tremendous caring statement to the teen. It says, “There are five people who care enough to rearrange their whole schedules to see that you don’t hurt yourself.” Second, it’s a bother. “Kids don’t like it after a very short while. Any manipulative motives that may have been mixed up in their suicide intent get drummed out rather quickly,” Johnson says. “And I tell them, ‘If you think this is bad, it’s worse in the hospital.’ Before long they begin to see that there are better ways to deal with their problems.”

George’s Three Bullets

Professional help notwithstanding, the power of any caring intervention is great. Mitch Anthony tells of George, one of the most high-risk teenagers Anthony has encountered in the rap sessions that are part of his high school suicide-prevention program:

Five years before George attended one of Anthony’s rap sessions, George’s father had killed himself. George believed that when he himself died, he would be met by a great light and could have any question answered. “What would your question be?” Mitch asked. “I would ask my father why he killed himself,” George whispered.

“I was scared,” says Mitch. “With a belief like that, there seemed nothing to keep him from getting his question answered.” Especially because George had it all planned: He had a loaded gun rigged in his room so that one pull of a string would end the last five years of pain and questioning. And he carried two more bullets with him to remind him he had an escape.

After the rap session, Anthony walked George and his girlfriend to his car. He told George, “You know, I really believe if you would get rid of those three bullets you would be crossing over the line from death to life.”

“Those bullets are my only safety valve,” said George.

“Well, would you at least commit yourself to reading this book?” Anthony asked, handing him a copy of his book Seven Reasons to Keep on Living, which presents the gospel as the foundation for purpose in life.

George agreed to read the book. Mitch Anthony prayed—hard.

That evening, after Anthony’s talk to the parents of the teenagers who had heard his presentation earlier that day in school, a woman approached him, tears in her eyes. “I’m George’s mother—thank you,” she said. “George gave me this envelope to give you.”

In the envelope were three bullets.

Diane Eble is assistant editor of Campus Life magazine. Names and personal details in this article have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals discussed.

The numbers boggle the mind as much as they terrify it. As of November of 1986, 24,011 cases of AIDS had been reported in this country, claiming 13,272 lives (the remainder are almost certain to meet the same fate). The U.S. Public Health Service believes the number of people with AIDS will increase to 270,000 by 1991. And Surgeon General C. Everett Koop projects the number of people worldwide who will die from AIDS could reach 100 million by the end of the century unless a cure is found.

But as incomprehensible as these figures are, they also invite speculation, especially among Christians. In fact, the urge to speculate has been almost irresistible. Why? The main way to get AIDS is to commit a certain kind of sin. In the U.S., about 73 percent of the people diagnosed with AIDS are hom*osexual and bisexual males. Hence, the speculation: Is the deadly disease God’s judgment on hom*osexuals?

The Judgment Theory

Already, a number of articles have appeared in conservative Christian publications suggesting AIDS is God’s punishment for hom*osexual behavior. We may cringe at this notion, but we cannot dispute it. The Bible condemns hom*osexual acts as sin, and the wages of sin is always death. God’s holy anger is set against all sin. He will not be trifled with and he will not be mocked. What we sow we will reap—if not now, certainly in eternity.

God may indeed be using AIDS to confront hom*osexuals with their sin. And since the disease is spreading to the heterosexual population, God may also be confronting all forms of promiscuity. There is literally no such thing anymore as “safe sex” outside the boundaries of marriage as God intended it. AIDS could be one dramatic method God is using to wake up a sinful society to the realities of sin and judgment.

Such a conclusion may be reached, but it is not helpful to stop there. Two reasons come to mind.

First, focusing on the judgment theory exposes the apparent inconsistency of the punishment. If God is using AIDS to punish hom*osexuals, why is he so ambiguous about it? Among hom*osexuals, AIDS is almost exclusively a male disease. Lesbians seem to be untouched. Then there is the growing number of innocent people who get AIDS: newborn infants, hemophiliacs, and wives of AIDS victims. The judgment theory raises more questions than it answers. Does God practice sex discrimination by afflicting only male hom*osexuals? Is he unjust to punish gays and to throw in a few random wives, hemophiliacs, and infants while he is at it?

I agree with William Cowper: “God moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.” Despite the problems I have with the idea, God might be judging sexual sin with AIDS. And there may be a righteous symmetry to his actions whose subtlety and wisdom escape my feeble, sin-darkened mind. But until I can see that symmetry—until the judgment theoreticians can explain it satisfactorily—it would be better to regard the theory with a benign agnosticism. It should be enough simply to say that sexual promiscuity of all kinds is sin and that the wages of sin is death, and leave it at that. We are all sinners and we all live out our days under the wrath of God, says Psalm 90. Disease, accidents, wars, earthquakes—all can be used by God to jolt us into repentance. But none need be seen as singling out a particular kind of sin for special punishment.

The Compassionate Response

There is another, more important reason that dwelling on the judgment theory is not helpful. What we need, what all gays need, is not a theory that says, in effect, “I told you so!”—but a call to compassionate action. God met the evil of the world not with a theological analysis, but with a cross. So should we.

In Albert Camus’s novel The Plague, the Jesuit priest Father Paneloux explains to his parishioners why the bubonic plague has hammered their city. “Calamity has come on you, my brethren,” he thunders, “and, my brethren, you deserved it.”

But later, a child of one of his parish families falls deathly sick with the plague. Paneloux the pastor must sit by his bed and watch him die in the midst of a ward of other dying sufferers. The little boy hangs on for days until one morning his frail body doubles up in a paroxysm of pain. Paneloux stares helplessly as the boy’s lips part and from them comes “a long, incessant scream, hardly varying with his respiration, and filling the ward with a fierce, indignant protest … that … seemed like a collective voice issuing from the sufferers there … the angry death-cry that has sounded through the ages.” Paneloux falls to his knees and himself cries out, “My God, spare this child!” But his prayer is drowned out by the wails of others in the hospital, joining the boy’s, flowing together in one continuous cry—a “gust of sobs” sweeping through the room.

The boy dies and Paneloux rises from his knees. He is a different man, no longer as confident of his grasp of God’s ways with the world, but sure of his duty as a Christian. He must stand with the sufferers. In his next sermon, he no longer addresses his people as “you” but as “we.” And he pleads with them to go forward to do whatever good might lie in their power.

In Camus’s novel, it took the death of an innocent child to give Paneloux the kind of wisdom that fosters compassion. Such a tragedy should be reason enough to elicit a caring response, but true followers of Christ have more. We have the love of a God who freely offered his mercy to everyone. He singled out the guilty not for punishment, but as the special objects of his concern. He did not condemn them further by reminding them of their sin. Instead, he took great pains to explain something utterly foreign, yet immensely comforting: There is mercy and forgiveness with God for even the most undeserving.

Near my home, in the neighboring city of Santa Ana, is a hospice for AIDS victims. It is a residential home opened to men who have no place to go, mainly because no one wants them. From all I have read about it, the motive of the owners is simple human compassion. To these frightened men, that feels like heaven.

It is not our job as Christians to make dying people feel worse. It is our job to give them hope and healing in the name of Christ. We have a wonderful opportunity to give the victims of AIDS simple human compassion and much, much more. We can give them not just a feeling of heaven, but heaven itself. We can give them hope in the mercy and forgiveness of God.

By Ben Patterson, a CT contributing editor.

For each of the last three years, June and Jim Bigham have packed a microwave and three suitcases in a frosted-tan Fleetwood sedan and spent up to 306 days away from their home in Oklahoma City. Their destinations ranged across the continent: Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Hartford, Connecticut; Anaheim, California; and Washington, D.C. In each place, they settled into a motel room or apartment for two or three months, at their own expense, and helped coordinate the thousands of details that produce a Billy Graham crusade.

To veterans of American evangelical church life, those crusade meetings flow with all the familiarity of an annual family reunion. George Beverly Shea sings “How Great Thou Art,” a choir several thousand strong rises for a harmonized hymn, and then Billy appears at the podium. Most of the people attending a Graham crusade experience it essentially as a solo performance, with the spotlight on one particularly gifted preacher.

But when June and Jim attend a crusade meeting, they see much more than that. They watch a full orchestra of volunteers tune up for a variety of tasks as “inquirers” come forward at the end of the meeting. “When the invitation is given, I can see the mechanics start to work,” June says.

During the two months preceding a crusade, the Bighams help prepare local church people to assist new believers into the community of faith. Before a springtime crusade in Washington, D.C., June answered telephone queries at the reception desk of the crusade office. Jim supervised mailings to local church volunteers, tinkering with a recalcitrant folding machine.

At the crusade meetings, they handled “counselor problems,” such as replacing lost or forgotten badges for church volunteers trained to meet individually with the people who respond to the meeting’s closing invitation. Once that task was finished, they scouted for two seats together, often winding up in the press section.

From a similar vantage point 30 years earlier, the Bighams first heard the gospel presented in a way that moved them.

They had never heard of Billy Graham when he came to the Oklahoma State fairgrounds in 1956. Jim recalls being one of six men collared in his church foyer and asked to usher at the crusade. Jim stayed for the preaching, and became increasingly offended night after night at the message he heard. “It was just too much for me,” he remembers. Graham’s emphasis on the need for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ presented Jim with a choice that shook his comfortable, Sunday-Christian presuppositions.

June was there as well, having made up her mind that she would not go forward without her husband. “I figured he needed it worse than I did. That’s how I rationalized it. But I certainly didn’t like hearing about hell and sin.” The Bighams had been married 13 years and had two children. “Our marriage was kaput. It was over. There was no hope, humanly speaking,” June said.

Church was no help. “Our church’s philosophy was, if you live right, the dying will take care of itself. We were trying to live right, but we didn’t have the power.” Finally, on the twenty-sixth day of the Oklahoma City crusade, Graham’s message hit home. When the invitation was offered, Jim reached out to June and asked if she wanted to go forward. “I had to run to catch her.”

No miraculous, overnight change occurred in their relationship, but both of them were challenged to develop a lifelong resolve to be in a right relationship with God. June was more enthusiastic, memorizing Scripture and accepting an invitation to join a women’s Bible study group. “I always tell people that I came to Christ with a big bang and Jim came with a slow burn,” she says.

Jim agrees. “I was gun shy—I didn’t want to become a nut.” But the Bighams joined a different church, and a persistent Bible instructor kept after Jim.

Gradually, the Bighams’ lives began changing. Eventually, June’s four brothers and sisters committed their lives to Christ. June became a Bible study teacher herself, and one day, June says, her 55-year-old mother approached with a question: “Do you think I’m too old to come to one of your Bible studies?” For June, “It was hard not to jump up and down and click my heels.”

When the crusade team returned to Oklahoma City in 1983, the Bighams did not have to be conscripted to help. They volunteered for the “Co-labor Corps,” staying up late into the night after each crusade meeting to index cards filled out by people who came forward. Church preference was noted for each individual, and a letter was sent that night to the person’s pastor or a compatible church. Cards with no church designation went to a separate committee for assignment to a local congregation.

As they helped out, June and Jim became aware of the meticulous preparation and follow-up invested in each Billy Graham crusade. An office for crusade staff and volunteers is established a year in advance, once Graham has accepted an invitation to preach. Pastors who represent the entire Christian community are recruited to encourage participation in classes held by Graham team specialists to train volunteer counselors. Committees engage the support of women, youth, ushers, and prayer warriors.

For the Bighams, even routine office work takes on profoundly fulfilling dimensions because of what the 1956 crusade meant to them. When they volunteered at the 1983 Oklahoma City crusade, Jim had been retired for six years from his job as a state management officer for the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. He and June had begun determining how they would occupy their time.

They told crusade officials they would be willing to help out at another crusade, and in 1984 they were invited to Anchorage, Alaska. The Bighams bought their plane tickets immediately. “We were there nearly six weeks,” Jim recalls. “We drove vans, made airport runs to pick up performers, and assisted with mailings.”

From January until March of 1985, June and Jim helped prepare Fort Lauderdale for its crusade. In April, they drove to Hartford, Connecticut. After wrapping up that crusade, the Bighams returned home to find a message on their telephone answering machine from the Graham Association saying, “Come to California.” They spent three days at home, packed up the microwave, and headed west for a crusade in Anaheim.

In 1985, the Bighams’ new Fleetwood covered 30,000 miles, and they learned how to pack at a moment’s notice for trips of several months’ duration. They travel light; the only treasure on display from home is a small photograph of Christian Eric Duffner, their grandson. June explains, “We took everything that is sentimental and can’t be replaced, and put it in the bank.” Adds Jim, “We have lights on timers and we have good neighbors.”

Their 1986 calendar included a volunteer stint at Graham’s conference for itinerant evangelists in Amsterdam and a crusade in Tallahassee in November. Columbia, South Carolina, and Denver hold crusades in 1987, and the Bighams will be there. As June puts it, “We figure that once upon a time, somebody had to do for us the things we’re doing now. The crusade in Oklahoma City didn’t just happen.”

They have placed their five-bedroom, custom-built home on the market. “Once we sell our house,” June jokes, “we may never go home.”

What an embarrassment! What humiliation for St. Paul, Minnesota: Winter Carnival without snow! How quickly a carefully cultivated public image can be shattered by unseasonably and unreasonably warm temperatures.

Before God rested from his creative labors he made winter. And we who live in St. Paul said, “It is good.” We delight in winter’s wonders and virtues. The pesky mosquitoes may keep us indoors during the fortunately brief days of summer, but it is in winter that God has called us to play out of doors. Below-zero temperatures and mounds of snow from Thanksgiving to Income Tax Day spare us the nuisance of lawn mowing. Instead, we cavort and exult in Winter Carnival season, complete with icefishing derbies, sled-dog races, ice palaces, snow queens, and two parades. (Eat your hearts out, Pasadena and New Orleans!)

At least, that is the way a Minnesota winter is supposed to be. But, alas, not this year. As I write this, my city has egg all over its civic pride. Balmy temperatures and an absence of snow threaten to make St. Paul just another Fort Lauderdale.

We hate to admit this, but we have been forced to haul in snow from Iowa or some such place just so we can hold the Winter Carnival’s famous snow-sculpture contests. But now even these magnificent snow figures, displaying such artistry and imagination, are dripping away. How sad. How fleeting. How temporary.

As I watch these sculptors—some from as far away as Japan—work with the snow, their dedication and determination are apparent. Most have carefully planned out their intended design and committed it to paper. Years of practice and thorough preparation lie behind their work. Attention to detail and exacting standards characterize their efforts. And yet, the sun and gentle breezes will soon undo what they have created.

Why do these snow sculptors do it? Why do they believe so passionately that their work is worthwhile though there may soon be little to show for it?

And what about my efforts? Are the results so different from those of the snow sculptors? Are my labors apt to produce something more permanent? Often not. My accomplishments are just as quick to melt from sight. But that need not mean my work is unnecessary, unworthy, or unappreciated.

For instance, sermons carefully prepared and prayed over are quickly gone and forgotten, once diligently preached. Occasionally, however, a sentence, an idea, or an image gives comfort, conviction, challenge, or assurance to one person in the depths of his or her heart. One thought from the entire sermon may be retained in that reservoir from which the Spirit of God draws resources in his ministry of grace to lives. That is enough to justify my effort.

I spend numerous hours counseling a young man, listening as he pours out the meanderings of his mind and the struggles of his heart. We talk of his faith and his doubts. I empathize with him in his fears and frustrations. Gently, patiently, wisely (I trust), I lead him through the decisions he must make, and I guide and encourage him as he chooses the values by which he will live. And then, suddenly and determinedly, he turns away in destructive and tragic ways, seeming to repudiate all that is good and godly.

What do I have to show for my efforts? What lasts? Is there anything I can point to to justify my expenditure of time and life and love on this young man? In God’s sovereignty and wisdom, I believe there is.

The sermon is gone before the sound waves have stopped. The investment in a young life now seems squandered in futility. Does anything remain of my work? Yes, I answer. I don’t shout the yes loudly or lightly, but yes, what I offer of myself in obedience to my calling God will surely use—sometime, if not now—in his gracious work in me if in no other way. And like the sculptor watching the snow melt away, I say, “That’s fine with me.”

Evangelical Rabbis in a Christian Mishnah?

While at times the CT Institute on eschatology [“Our Future Hope,” Feb. 6] reminded me of evangelical rabbis in a Christian Mishnah, I appreciated the discussion. My only regret was that Kantzer’s “plea for unity” has been ignored by the evangelical … church. I pastor a church that could not allow men like John Calvin, Martin Luther, Francis Schaeffer, John J. Davis, Charles Hodge, and a host of others to join or teach because of their eschatological positions. That’s not just unfortunate, it is a sinful tragedy, which shames the gospel of Jesus Christ as much as Peter’s refusal to eat with the Gentile believers in Antioch.

REV. MIKE BOYER

Everett Evangelical Free Church

Everett, Wash.

The CT Institute discussion was excellent. Gleason Archer’s comments make me recall a story about an ardent dispensational premillennialist like Dr. Archer, who visited his physician with a sore throat. The doctor put the tongue suppressor in the man’s mouth and instructed him to say “ah.” After much effort, all the patient could manage was a muted “pree.” In frustration, the doctor demanded to know why the dispensationalist would not cooperate. He replied, “Doc, I am so convinced of my premillennial view I can’t even say the first syllable of that other viewpoint.”

REV. BOB PARSLEY

First Baptist Church

Prescott, Ark.

The vignettes of the various millennial views were very helpful, but in error on at least one point. Midtribulation premillennialism actually is a special case of pretribulation premillennialism, not a variety of the posttribulation kind. In both the pretrib and midtrib systems, the Rapture comes before the Great Tribulation. The only difference between the two is that pretribs call the whole seven years “the Great Tribulation,” while midtribs insist that only the last three-and-a-half of the seven years qualify for that title.

REV. CECIL TAYLOR, PH. D.

Cedar Crest Southern Baptist Church

West Monroe, La.

Thank you for a fine job editing our discussion on eschatology. May I suggest one correction? In the bibliography under amillennialism, the volume of mine that should have been listed is not Created in God’s Image but The Bible and the Future (Eerdmans, 1982).

ANTHONY A. HOEKEMA

Calvin Theological Seminary

Grand Rapids, Mich.

I would like to report from personal experience that pretrib premils are “Rapture happy”—they practically worship the Rapture. It will save their skins—at least that’s the impression they give. Jesus should be our focus, not the Rapture; if it comes, fine, but if not, we are called to be faithful.

JACK F. MANIER

Dayton, Ohio

Why defend a lie?

Charles Colson is among the most respected of current Christian writers. However, in his “Must Government Deal in Deception?” [Feb. 6] he goes too far in defending the situational lie. Rahab was commended for her faith, not for her deception.

VERN LEWIS

Lyle, Minn.

Colson asks, “Can government always tell the truth?” He seems to imply that sometimes it cannot. I would like to suggest the reason it often “cannot” is revealed in some of the examples Colson cites; currency manipulation and meddling in the internal affairs of other nations is so commonplace today that we almost expect it from our government. But when government insists on doing things it should not do, it is not surprising that lies are used to cover the dirty tracks whenever possible. If government did its job (protecting the lives and property of citizens within its borders), there would be much less “need” for lying and cover-ups.

HAROLD ORNDORFF, JR.

Highland Heights, Ky.

Robert Coles versus “Wheel of Fortune”

After your cover story on Carl Rogers, I was surprised to see yet another psychologist on the cover in the person of Robert Coles [“The Crayon Man,” Feb. 6]. However, I found the articles, as well as Dr. Coles, both elucidating and challenging. In the same week in which Newsweek’s feature was television game shows, an in-depth, yet readable account of one who finds biblical truth in the poverty of children is extremely refreshing.

REV. ANTHONY L. BLAIR

Lurgan United Brethren in Christ Church

Shippensburg, Pa.

Thank you for the article about Robert Coles and his work, which updates Legh Richmond’s Annals of the Poor of 150 years ago. Then compare that article with the one debating the details of eschatology. The latter is intellectually stimulating, but what does our Lord think of this? How much more does the Bible say about the poor than it does about the millennium? Why do our shibboleths (doctrinal statements) include the latter and not something about our interpretation of Matthew 25:31–46?

RALPH A. EWERT

Lincoln, Neb.

The article on Robert Coles is one of the most extraordinary in the history of CHRISTIANITY TODAY.

NORMAN R. WENGER

Sun City, Ariz.

I sincerely appreciated Philip Yancey’s interview of Dr. Coles. It stimulated me once again to take a good look at whether I am trying to pull “A’s” out of my walk with the Lord, or if I am truly serving him in Spirit and truth by taking time for the least and the best of these.

Regretfully, the conclusion to the article leaves one hanging on the thin line of misinterpreting the “spark” as a statement for universal salvation. We must never leave it unclear that the spark of God’s image is marred in every human, and only the washing of Christ’s redemptive blood can regenerate that marred relationship with God.

REV. DAVID E. GRUDUM

Grace Bible Fellowship Church

Reading, Pa.

Gored Oxymorons

Prof. Warren S. Blumenfeld of Georgia State University recently published a book that catalogues thousands of oxymorons, those self-contradictory expressions like jumbo shrimp, freezer burn, and working vacation.

As I read the book I realized, with all due respect to Professor Blumenfeld, that he had overlooked a few oxymorons from in and around my church. Take, for example, our pastor assuring us that due to Communion, he would be giving a mini sermon.

Or the poster that announced the community Easter sunrise service would feature a unified choir. Whoever wrote that has obviously never sat in a choir loft.

Then there was the announcement in our bulletin noting that the church was looking for a volunteer junior-high leader. And the short business meeting announced by our board chairman to discuss hiring a long-term youth pastor.

It really got bad when I was invited to a conference where the keynote address was by an expert in practical theology.

Now that I’ve alerted you to their existence, you’ll quickly find other Sunday morning oxymorons. But why take my word for it? I’m a confirmed skeptic.

EUTYCHUS

Saying “no” more than once

In response to your editorial “Saying No” (Feb. 6), youthful sex is not the only social issue where a secular or sanctified “no” would correct a multiplicity of problems. Isn’t it amazing that when one observes biblical principle, even in the twentieth century, so many negatives, natural consequences, are avoided. It makes one wonder whether the physical world and the message of the Bible might not have something in common—doesn’t it?

DWIGHT E. ACOMB

Fresno, Calif.

Praise the Lord! Finally a prochastity movement. I have been trying to explain (and even understand, myself) my feelings and ideas for solutions to teen pregnancy before abortion is an option. To me, the solution is not stopping abortions but stopping the reason for them by building self-esteem and making “saying no” peer acceptable, and even “cool”—or whatever it is they say these days.

LOIS MARTZ

Hillsboro, Oreg.

Model oneness

Thank you for your news coverage of the ICBI’S Summit III on the application of Scripture [News, Feb. 6]. The article, however, implied more basic differences than consensus among conferees. The opposite is true: a genuine, congenial spirit prevailed. Together they discussed; together they prayed and sang; and together they forged out more than 170 resolutions on which they would agree.

ICBI is nearing the completion of its ten-year plan. A lot has been accomplished—but in minimizing these accomplishments, history will show that ICBI’S greatest contribution lies in the fact that men and women of strongly differing theological systems, yet all committed to the Scriptures, could in fact work together and produce together. ICBI is a model of true ecumenicity for years to come.

CARY M. PERDUE

International Council on Biblical Inerrancy

Walnut Creek, Calif.

Family to the rescue

One small correction in your report about the Second Mile Project I initiated to help Pastor Charles Blair and Calvary Temple in Denver [“A Concerned Christian Goes the Second Mile,” Feb. 6]: Instead of 24, there were 50 Christian leaders on the National Committee of Concern, representing all theological and ministry positions. It is a classic example of the whole family of God helping one part that is hurting.

J. ALLAN PETERSEN

Family Concern

Wheaton, Ill.

So many presidents!

Concerning the appointment of Robert A. Seiple as president of World Vision [Jan. 16], Mr. Seiple was appointed President of World Vision US; the Rev. Tom Houston is President of WV International. Because your magazine is widely read outside the United States, it is important that any confusion in the minds of your readers be removed.

WILLIAM J. NEWELL

World Vision Canada

Mississauga, Ont., Canada