Christian Universalism

The Liminal

01-02-2024 • 1 hr 4 mins

This episode is an overview of themes around Christian Universalism: the position that a loving and just God could never punish finite sin with infinite torment, and that salvation and reconciliation will ultimately reach everyone.

For this episode, I read David Bentley Hart's magnum opus of a book, "That All Shall Be Saved," plus critical reviews and related scholarly commentaries of its themes. I think Hart's book is a text that will shine in history as a desperately needed correction to longstanding bad hermeneutics and bad witness that are formed by, and help perpetuate, ghoulish ideas about hell and thus the nature of God.

I give an overview of eschatological positions in (what I hope is) a very approachable format, and I touch on related topics like original sin and the fall.

So much of faith deconstruction is disillusionment and disappointment. But in Universalism, I find my imagination blossoming with hope again, picturing what a Christianity of gardeners instead of gatekeepers could really mean for our metaphorically and literally burning planet.