Universalism: A Summary Defense (by Richard Beck)

I came across this article at by Professor Richard Beck, an excellent introductory case for Universalism.  Followers of my blog probably pick up on my fixation on different ideas of afterlife that have developed within the Christian tradition, as well as my personal ambivalence with settling on one view.  As a Christian Universalist, Richard Beck does not share that ambivalence, and since I get a fair amount of traffic searching “hell” or “universalism,” it seemed a good chance to share:

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Universalism: A Summary Defense

by Richard Beck

Watch the Jesus Creed blog in the coming days and weeks as Scot McKnight will be starting a series on if evangelicals can be universalists. Early in the history of this blog I posted my reasons for subscribing to universalism. Lately I’ve wanted to pull those arguments into a summary post. Here, then, are the reasons I believe in universal reconciliation, the eventual redemption of all of humanity.

1. Talbott’s Propositions (along with a discussion of moral luck and human volition)
The philosopher Thomas Talbott has us consider the following three propositions:

1. God’s redemptive love extends to all human sinners equally in the sense that he sincerely wills or desires the redemption of each one of them.
2. Because no one can finally defeat God’s redemptive love or resist it forever, God will triumph in the end and successfully accomplish the redemption of everyone whose redemption he sincerely wills or desires.
3. Some human sinners will never be redeemed but will instead be separated from God forever.

All three propositions have ample biblical support. But, as Talbott points out, you cannot, logically, endorse all three. Talbott goes on to show how the various soteriological systems adopt two of the propositions and reject/marginalize the third. Summarizing how this happens:

1. Calvinism/Augustinianism: Adopt #2 and #3. God will accomplish his plans and some will be separated from God forever. This implies a rejection of #1, that God wills to save all humanity. This conclusion is captured in the doctrine of election and double predestination (i.e., God predestines some to be saved and some to be lost).
2. Arminianism: Adopt #1 and #3. God loves all people and some people will be separated from God forever. This implies that God’s desires–for example, to save everyone–can be thwarted and unfulfilled. This is usually explained by an appeal to human choice. Due to free will people can resist/reject God. Thus, where a Calvinist put the “blame” on God for someone going to hell (election) Arminians place the blame on people (free will).
3. Universalism: Adopt #1 and #2. God loves all people and will accomplish his purposes. This implies a rejection of #3. The implication is that God will continue his salvific work in some postmortem fashion. Note that this postmortem salvific work can, and often does, involve a strong vision of hell and be Christocentric.

I reject Calvinism because I find the doctrine of election to be loathsome. I don’t find God worthy of worship, praise or service if he created people with the intention of torturing most of them forever. True, such actions would demonstrate his sovereignty and “justice” but it is hard to see those actions as loving and praise-worthy. Also, I don’t see how Calvinism allows for a dynamic and interactive relationship between God and humanity. We end up being mere puppets and playthings.

To be fair, the reason Calvinism and Reformed theology leave me cold is largely biographical. I grew up in an Arminian tradition. Since college, however, I’ve also grown disillusioned with free will soteriological and theodicy systems. For three interrelated reasons:

1. Moral Luck: We begin life in very different places, morally and religiously. Some people get a head start on Christianity. Others are raised in different religious traditions. Further, our life journeys can be highly variable, religiously and morally. A child might be abused by a church leader. A missionary might never show up at your village.
2. The Timing of Death is Unpredictable: The death event is arbitrary in its timing. Some people live to a ripe old age and get to repent of past sins or find the time to explore Christianity (if they were born in another religion). Other people die young and never get the chance, through no fault of their own, to repent or explore Christianity.
3. Free Will is a Non-Starter: As a psychologist I’ve come to believe that human volition (will) is very circumscribed and anemic in its powers. Humans have the capacity for choice, and perhaps freedom within a certain range, but at the end of the day human choice is finite and limited. It can only do so much.

Given that our moral and religious journeys are qualitatively different (e.g., moral luck: some people get head starts), that death is random (which can arbitrarily lengthen or shorten your religious and moral journey) and a realistic view of human volitional powers (there is no radical form of free will) it was difficult for me to maintain the Arminian stance of my religious heritage.

So, having rejected both Reformed and Arminian thinking I’ve settled on universalism as the soteriological and eschatological system that best describes my views on salvation and redemption.

2. A Morally Coherent View of Justice
Most defenders of a classical view of hell eventually make appeals to God’s justice. However, for justice to be justice it has to meet a few, almost axiomatic, standards. Most importantly, all notions of justice involve proportionality. As they say, the punishment must fit the crime. Thus, a punishment of infinite duration and unspeakable torment fails to meet any moral standard of justice. More, if we want to link justice to love then there needs to be a rehabilitative facet to the punishment. Not all justice is rehabilitative. Capital punishment isn’t. But aloving justice will try to accomplish three things:

1. Vengeance for Victims (Justice)
2. Rehabilitation of the Perpetrators (Grace)
3. The Reconciliation of Perpetrators and Victims (Forgiveness and Repentance)

Of the major soteriological systems only universalism gets us all three of these things.

3. Missional Concerns Over the Soteriological/Eschatological Disjoint
Many people in the church see salvation as a binary, you are either saved or lost. Christians then fetishize this status, obsessing over who, at Judgment Day, will be saved or lost. This causes the Christian community to become otherworldly in its focus, ignoring the cosmic (e.g., social, political, ecological) and developmental (i.e., sanctification) aspects of salvation. This becomes a missional problem in the church, where people just look to “get saved,” eschatologically speaking. But it is hard to fault people for this fetish if they are seeing thing correctly, that there will be a non-reversible binary judgement at the end of all things. In short, as much as missional church leaders want to instill the notion that salvation is this-worldly as well as other-worldly they will fail, for clear psychological reasons, unless they undermine the classic doctrine of hell. Leave the classical teaching of hell intact (overtly or by trying to ignore it) and you’ll compromise your missional effort. Like it or not, hell and mission are intimately related. Worries over hell (which can’t be helped if you leave the doctrine intact) will import otherworldliness into the mission of the church.

4. Regulating Passages
The biggest objection to universalism involve the passages regarding hell in the bible. However, there is no doctrinal teaching that doesn’t have contradictory tensions within the biblical witness. Witness the hermeneutical and exegetical diversity within the Christian tradition. In short, universalists are not in any unique position. This is the way it is with just about any doctrine.

The issue, then, ultimately boils down to which biblical texts will regulate doctrinal choices. For example, which of the two passages regulates your doctrine regarding female leadership in the church:

1. “I do not permit a woman to teach, nor have authority over a man.” (1 Timothy 2.12)
2. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3.28)

If you are a Complementarian Passage #1 regulates your understanding of Passage #2. If you are an Egalitarian Passage #2 regulates how you understand Passage #1. An there is no way to resolve any debate between the two camps as these are meta-biblical choices.

A similar thing holds for the soteriological debates. Universalists have regulating passages that frame how they understand the texts about hell. Here are four regulating texts for universalists:

1. “God is love.” (1 John 4.8)
2. “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.” (Colossians 1.19-20)
3. “When he has done this, then the Son himself will be made subject to him who put everything under him, so that God may be all in all.” (1 Corinthians 15.28)
4. “For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all.” (Romans 11.32)

As with the gender texts one has to choose regulating texts about hell. And these are meta-biblical choices. People who believe in a classical vision of hell will read the four passages above through that lens. Universalists, by contrast, will read the texts on hell through the lens of these four passages. That is, they will teach that hell must:

1. Be a manifestation that “God is love.”
2. Be a means to “reconcile all things” to God
3. Allow God to be “all in all”
4. Provide a way for God to “have mercy upon all”

5. Hope
I think it was Karl Barth who said that he couldn’t be sure that universalism was true but that it was every Christian’s obligation to hope that it was true.

the Didache // Tony Jones introduces “The Teaching of the Twelve”

Only within this past year, I became aware of and interested in an ancient document called the Didache.  It is an ancient manual of sorts from the early church that many scholars date to 50-70 A.D.  That date makes it concurrent with the earlier gospels and the Q source, and also predating much of Paul’s influence.  In fact, though a few scholars dispute this, the Didache seems to show no knowledge whatsoever regarding the Apostle Paul and his teachings, arguably giving us a window into the narrow sliver of pre-Pauline Christianity.  This is not to dog Paul by any means, but as a central figure in the shaping of late first century Christianity, his particular hermenutics, philosophies, scholasticism, and worldview are of interest to those of us asking this question: just how much did Paul’s particular worldview alter the course of  Christianity.  I grew up in churches where sermons where derived almost without exception from Paul’s epistles, and this became more disturbing to me as I became aware of how different “reading Jesus through the lens of Paul” is from “reading Paul through the lens of Jesus.”  Though both Jesus and Paul came out of the Pharisaic sect of Judaism, Paul was much more esoteric and spiritual-minded (as opposed to a very earthy, Jewish, and political Jesus), with Greek Stoic influence and a much keener interest in marginalizing Torah in his cosmopolitan proselytization.

I became aware of the Didache via Tony Jones.  Jones is a writer I’ve followed with much interest for a few years, and he recently completed a book on the Didache, titled The Teaching of the Twelve: Believing and Practicing the Primitive Christianity of the Ancient Didache Community.  He provided an mp3 reading of the entire text, a short 17 minutes long, which I reposted below along with a word file of the full text if you are interested.

I’ll offer some more thoughts on this key early text in following posts.  It is a practical manual for Christian community, offering directions on everything from how to do Baptism (setting the silly debate over whether sprinkling or dunking was normative in the early church- it was both), Eucharist and who can partake (and I happen to disagree with the Didache here), sexual ethics, admonishments to the wealthy or ungenerous, reiterations of general teachings from Jesus, directions on when to fast or recite the Lord’s Prayer, and what to think of itinerant teachers and how to know if a teacher is a false prophet.  Didache seems to indicate the pre-Pauline churched looked on preachers with no alternative source of income as false prophets!  *cue up the irony of salaried pastors wishing for a return to early christianity*  This is a question my wife and I have been asking myself recently and just can’t seem to settle on (whether or not I feel it is ethical to derive a salary from a ministry).  That may have to wait for a later post.

Jones argues that the Didache’s message on ethics, in contrast to the perfection goal of Paul, can be summed up as this: try your best.

Didache (audio of the full text, via Tony Jones)

The Didache text

Hell: my research on places, verses and problems

I get a daily tally of terms people are Googling to reach my site.  Recently, I’ve noticed a sharp upturn in people landing on my site by searching about “Hell.”  Aside from this post, I haven’t written much on the subject, but I figure the least I could contribute is a bit of research I’ve accumulated over the past few years on the topic of Hell.  I make it no secret that I don’t hold to what is generally called the traditional, literalist, or exclusivist view of hell.  This is largely because I find it to be neither traditional, nor respectful of the context of Scripture, nor philosophically coherent, nor considerate of the Gospel as Jesus taught.  I think we need to take the doctrine of Hell much more seriously, but we need to do so Biblically instead of taking culture’s common perception.

"Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here"... though we may deny it, we naturally feel the disconnect between Love and perhaps-misguided understandings of "justice"

A few general Issues arising with a belief in a literal Hell:

1) To begin, to think of a literal, fiery Hell, we are speaking of a metaphysical “place”; that is, a sort of beyond-place place, or a “place” for “places” that don’t have “places.”  It’s confusing to begin with.  You have the same problem in positing a metaphysical Heaven as a place as well, but it is worth noting that the ancient church believed in Resurrection here on earth rather than ascension to an ethereal realm  Most believers seem to resort to ascribing Hell to an invisible realm unworthy of scrupulous discourse due to being a matter “beyond earthy comprehension.”  But I think such language should be a red flag for us, hinting that we need further study in a matter rather than abandonment due to complexity.

2) A very large second problem with believing in a literal Hell is that the word “Hell” never appears in scripture; not even once.  Many words are mistranslated loosely as Hell, but no word in our modern cannon accurately translates into this concept.

3) Third, I was quite surprised to learn how untraditional the “traditional” view of Hell actually was.  We certainly do find a “traditional” view of Hell emerging within the first few centuries A.D., but we also find Annihilationists (the unrighteous cease to exist post-mortem), Universalists (all are reconciled to God in the end), and Reincarnationists among the early church fathers right from the begining.  Many scholars argue early Christianity was Universalist or Annihilationist before it adopted a belief in Hell.   Most of these coexisted well until the Creedal era of refining dogmatism.  You may notice that the Apostle Paul seems to alternate between universalism and annihilationism in his poetic descriptions of the eschaton, but never once uses a word that can be mistranslated as Hell.  The matter is left somewhat vague in Scripture, but we can know for certain that different Biblical authors would have disagreed on the matter of what happens to a person after they die.  So perhaps we are meant to be somewhat vague on the matter if we take a high view of Scripture.

4) On a more vague note (but perhaps the most important of all), most people recognize at least a disconnect with a radically inclusive and reconciliatory Jesus Christ with the concept of Hell.  The conflict arising from reconciling unremitting Love with torturous exclusion is difficult to deal with.  Many resort to taking a soft view on Hell, being that there is an eternal, conscious separation from God for the unrighteous, but that the separate place does not involve fiery torture.  It looks like a move forward, but I suspect this merely provides cover for an difficult exclusionary view by softening the emotional factor required by imagining the pain of fire.

I would argue that our theologies of hell very often have more in common with Dante's Inferno than with Scripture

5) Like conceiving of God as a person, one with gender, or conceiving of salvation as a legal trade-off, the belief in a literal Hell seems quite archaic and anthropocentric.  Like a six-day creation story or a flat earth with four corners, it sounds an awful lot like a pre-scientific people trying to grapple with reality using only the conceptual tools available to them.  To dogmatize these beliefs even where they do occur in history runs the risk of betraying the very real concepts they were trying to describe by not moving beyond admittedly simplistic narratives into the truth they were pointing to.

As for my own view, while I can no longer hold to the literalist, exclusivist view of Hell with any integrity of my own, I don’t quite know what I believe.  I’m ok with that because I think the Scriptures would have spelled it out with clarity if we were supposed to be able to put it in a doctrinal statement.  I tend to alternate between Annihilationism and Universalism, and when I lean towards Universalism, it is only the softer version that C.S. Lewis describes (in which a universally reconciliatory paradise would be something of a hell for those refusing to live in a reconciled way with creation, others, and the Creator).  But like anytime I speculate on something so ethereal, I assume I am at least partly wrong 100% of the time.

Below is an outline of some research I did on the word “Hell” before leading my small group through a study of it.  I list here in detail every single place in the Bible that a one of the 3 Greek words translated as “Hell” appear.  I did not list the appearances of “Sheol” since scholars agree with unanimity that, contrary to King James’ translation, it meant “grave” not “Hell”.  Here’s the outline:

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Hell

Two very important questions to consider when looking at the word “hell” in the Bible:

-Where do we find the word hell?

-What does it mean in that particular contextual moment?

-Is my understanding of Hell more Biblical or cultural?

Gehenna, Hades, Tatarus, Sheol

Gehenna

Matthew: occurs eight times

Matt 2:22- “raca”- contempt. Fool. .  Anger and Contempt

Matt 5:29,30- adultery.  Cut off eye/hand to avoid whole body into hell.  Lust

Matt 10:28- God can destroy both body/soul in hell.  Don’t fear ppl. . Misplaced Fear

Matt 18:9- repeats 5:29.  Refers to ppl deceiving/stopping God’s work  (getting in the way)

Matt 23:15,33- Pharisees, converts, twice as much a son of hell.  Hypocrisy

Mark: three times

Mark 9:43,45,47- (parallels Matt 5:29,30)

Luke: once

Luke 12:5- (parallels matt 10:28)

James: once

James 3:6- tongue set on fire by Hell

modern day Gehenna: the valley one the south side of Jerusalem, often translated in English as "Hell"

Hades

Matthew: occurs twice

Matt 11:23- “you will go down to the depths”  (rendered depths in NIV)

Matt 16:18-  “gates of Hades will not overcome it” (as Hades, not Hell in NIV)

Luke: twice

Luke 10:15- “Capernaum… you will go down to the depths.” (rendered depths)

Luke 16:23- Rich man and Lazarus (rendered Hell)

Acts: twice

Acts 2:27, 31- rendered grave, from Hades… translation of Sheol (from Ps. 16:8-11)

I Corinthians: once

I Cor. 15:55- renedered death, from Hades…translation of Sheol (Hos. 13:14)

Revelation: four times

Rev 1:18- rendered Hades

Rev 6:8- rendered Hades

Rev 20:13,14- rendered Hades

Tartarus

2 Peter: occurs once

II Pet 2: rendered hell.  Sent angels to be held in dungeons for judgement

Sheol

In old testament.  Everyone (good and bad) went here.  Sometimes mistranslated as “hell” but is more accurately translated as “grave.”  The Hebrew Scriptures were redacted and compiled c. 4-500 years B.C., and though scholars will testify much of the Scriptures were written under psuedonyms attributed to older writers, we can also safely assume much of the Old Testament was being transcribed as accurately as possible from a time much earlier.  But since the Israelite cult did not assume a fixed theology of afterlife until the influences of Babylon and Persia, we can also assume that Sheol did not refer to a conscious afterlife in any certain sence, and even more certainly assume that Sheol did not refer to Hell as we think of it today, as those reading older Biblical translation (a la KJV) may be lead to assume.

Hell, as an English word

the English word “hell” is derived from Hel, the name of the mythological Nordic goddess of the underworld.

The Greek word translated Paradise in Luke 23:24 is “paradeisos.” For the Greeks, paradeisos referred to the Persian concept of a well-watered grove, garden, park, or hunting ground, which for the Greeks was a part of hades set aside for the heroic among others and as distinguished from the portion of hades where some of the dead were tortured.

Hell occurs in NIV 14 times

Hell occurs in NASB 13 times

Eikon AltView: Tad DeLay

this is part of a series called altView. these are stories of faith from the people of our community. no filters. no agendas. no prompts. just people telling their stories. hope you enjoy!

A/theism

Tad DeLay

“He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow

When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,

And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart

Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing thou art.

Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme

Worshiping with frail images a folk-lore dream,

And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address

The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless

Thou in magnetic mercy to thyself divert

Our arrows aimed unskillfully, beyond desert;

And all men are idolaters, crying unheard

To a deaf idol, if thou take them at their word.

Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great,

Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.”

-C.S. Lewis

Yesterday, a friend asked if I believe in God.  It’s a necessary question, but peculiar in that it’s relevance is somewhat detached from me much in the same way that whether or not the earth is flat or whether quantum mechanics is bunk are irrelevant questions. Nobody really believes in God, at least not most of the time.  Belief in god is easily affirmed or denied.

I do not believe in God.

Lewis so eloquently describes how what we call god is not, in fact, God.  By our own definitions, God is transcendent to any conception, so try as we may, we can only ever speak of an idea of God, an idol.  To speak of God, we necessarily suspend our belief in transcendence.  We speak as atheists; every theologian is paradoxically an atheist in his moment of brilliance.  To be faithful and speak of god, or to speak of god’s ideals for the world, carries a necessary betrayal of the very God we are trying to wrap our minds around.  We speak as a/theists.

I do believe in God.

This lays the groundwork for humility in our theologies and philosophies.  We must become comfortable with the fact that when we speak of/for god, we are at least partly wrong 100% of the time.  No eye has seen; no ear has heard.  Our Scriptures set an example with irresolvable inconsistencies in the poets’ and prophets’ pictures of God.  The late Jacques Derrida wrote that Justice was the only nondeconstructable idea.  From Justice, all blessings flow.  We affirm this, and we call it Gospel.  The Scriptures did not so narrowly define our theologies for us; they did not intend to.  At best, the prophets could only narrow a definition of God to powerfully simple ideas: Love, Justice, Mercy, or Reconciliation.  We affirm that real belief in God looks like these things.  To move beyond simplicity is the essential work of theologians; to put them into practice is the essential work of the Church; to move these things into an inerrant, unquestionable system is the work of the idolater.  Embrace and excommunication is our tragic history of sorting these things out.

I am called to be a theologian, and it is what I will spend my life doing.  But I always feel this nagging suspicion that God is far less concerned with endless debates about what the Bible exactly is; he laughs at our foolishness, and she (does this pronoun aggravate?) weeps at our often destructive misunderstandings.  I assume God is far more concerned that we suspend our questions and do the things God hopes to see.  We prioritize humility and  Justice.  There is a time for debate, but it is always a good time for Reconciliation.

This is true belief, true faith in the Divine: it is only when I do not obsess conceptualizing god and instead unconsciously, as second nature, act out god’s dreams for the world that I truly believe in God.

I hope to one day believe in God.

Tad Delay recently married his best friend, and together they hope to spend their lives working out the social action their faith claims to believe. Tad is a hack theologian and will be sad to leave Eikon next fall for seminary, but may come back one day as Dr. Tad, Ph.D.

Harvey Cox’s “The Future of Faith”

I just received for review The Future of Faith by Harvard’s professor of divinity emeritus, Harvey Cox.  I’m going to go ahead and say it’s a must read for anyone interested in a faithfully critical look at the construction of doctrines within Christian history, as well as the different sects that emerged with those doctrines.  Brilliant research, accessible readability, Cox’s personal history with varying traditions, and allegories of discussions with everyone from Jerry Falwell to the Pope Benedict make this an incredibly inclusive and in-depth look at the history of the Church.

Cox’s central thesis is that the church is edging into a “Age of the Spirit,” as he puts it, a move beyond the “Age of Belief” that dominated the church from the 4^th century at Nicaea until the mid 20^th century.  This age of Spirit will see the multifaceted and never consistent belief structure of the pre-Constantinian church, a less emphasis on lists of beliefs as requirement for inclusion, and higher emphasis on praxis.  The age of beliefs killed the spirit, and with it we learned to kill each other for the purpose of consistency under the name of piety.  The Catholics coined the elegant Latin killjoy, Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, to mean there was no salvation outside the (Catholic) Church.  As of late, American Fundamentalism has sought to do the same with sets of beliefs chosen in response to the religious debates of the 1920’s.  As Cox sees it, we are moving beyond this.  While it will never disappear, Fundamentalism is on the decline, and the shift resulting from globalization requires a new emphasis on, not just inter-faith dialogue,  but intrafaith faith dialogue as well with the margins resisting change of any kind from a firmly 19^th/20^th century faith.

In his chapter entitled “The Road Runner and the Gospel of Thomas,” Cox points to salient histories that just ain’t so.  Like the coyote running of a cliff while chasing the roadrunner while continuing to suspend in air, our pervasive myths of history support us well- at least until we learn that we have no historical ground beneath this.  For Catholics, this may come in the form of scholarship highlighting the lack of veracity in claims of Apostolic Succession.  In a system where claim to power comes from being heir to Peter, one needs to continue to believe in a myth that things simply were this way from the beginning.  Protestants do this same thing, believing 1) that there was a set of original beliefs based purely on the Bible (even though the Bible would not be constructed until the late 4^th century) and 2) they, or their church, conforms to this list of proper orthodox beliefs.  In fact, these two beliefs are always illusory.  These misunderstandings stem from, Cox argues, a myth of orthodoxy.  Scholarship is simply pummeling these myths.  As Cox puts it, research shows “scattered throughout the Roman Empire from Antioch to Gaul, there was no standardized theology, no single pattern of governance, no uniform liturgy, and no commonly accepted scripture… Some, especially around Jerusalem, emphasized the historical Jesus; others, the universal Christ; and still others, a mystical inner Christ.”

With the advent of Emperor Constantine pushing for a uniform Christianity to stabilize the fledgling Roman Empire, power was handed to certain clergymen who were by no means disinterested or objective observers. When time came to settle on holy books, beliefs, or authority structures, preferences were read back into the texts and histories selected, which created a myth of orthodoxy.  It’s much the same as the way we remember what we want to remember in order to justify ourselves in a fight, or how we chose to ignore unsettling factoids about past men we want to venerate.  A movement that had begun with a messiah, crucified because of the political danger he posed, now hopped into bed with “the Man.”  Ever since, Christians have felt entitled to political nobility, seeking to create laws that either benefit them or enforce their ideals.  The irony of the first ecumenical council at Nicaea in 325 A.D. being called by a pagan emperor and deciding that, yes, Jesus and God must be one in the same, is an irony lost on most Christians today.  Yes, we believe this about Jesus being co-eternal with the Father, but would we believe this if not for a group of power-hungry bishops being lobbied for this position by a sun-worshipping emperor, all while surrounding the council of bishops stood soldiers with swords drawn awaiting for their consent to a particular belief?  It’s really quite impossible to tell.

Cox argues that 3 developments have undermined the myth of orthodoxy:

1) The 1940’s finding of the ancient texts hidden and preserved in caves provided us with gospels and biblical texts unseen for the better part of two millennia.  Though most likely written under a pseudonym (likely as several books of the New Testament were), the Gospel of Thomas and others presented us with texts every bit as old as several of the Canonical Gospels.  We saw in these ancient manuscripts such evidence that the early Christian community already varied far and wide in belief and practice.  This combined with finding older texts of books we include in the Bible already, texts with sometimes differed very significantly with our versions today (much as your average apologist insists the opposite), shook of the educated world from the myth of a perfectly preserved Biblical text, dictated word-for-word from God, from whence our current beliefs come from.

2)  Until very recently, historians and New Testament scholars did not talk.  One held the realm of scholarship, the other the realm of religion.  After all, Cox comments, NT scholars were supposed to work with inerrant texts, while historians new, with evidence in hand, that this was not the case.  Historians new as well, to the chagrin of Catholic scholars, that apostolic authority was a contrived myth, and nor were early Christian theologians neutral or critical as historians.  But when historians and Biblical scholars hop into bed, a love child of a more educated and informed faith emerges, although this education has been slow to disseminate to the masses.  Even pastors, who become very well aware of the problems with Biblical texts in seminaries, rarely pass on this information to their congregations.

3)  The third development is a “people’s history” of Christianity.  Sans Gutenberg’s cheap publishing, today’s blogs, or even literacy, most of our pictures of early Christianity come from far less than 1%- the most political and the most educated.  Like today’s heady theologians, such men do good work, but do not represent the common people’s Christianity.  Recent work has rediscovered this, painting a broader picture of the amorphous early Church, and further killing the myth of one orthodoxy.

At last, Cox slides in the problem of reading the Gospel through our culture.  As a culture that emphasizes separation of church and state, or coming from a stream of theology that emphasizes “getting saved,” it is all to easy to miss the earthy message of Christ, and the political reasons he was killed for.  We miss the anti-empire rhetoric of Jesus, John’s Revelation, and the early church.  We miss that early Christians were persecuted not for telling people they were going to hell if they didn’t believe in Jesus, but because they refused to pledge allegiance to Rome, because they (in a rare example of early unanimity) refused to participate in politics or the military, because they refused to look like patriots.  In a cultural theology that encourages all these things, it’s really quite easy to miss messages.

More on Cox’s work to come… conversations with the Pope, pagans writing our Creeds, the rise of American 20^th century Fundamentalism, and the future of faith.