Hitler – Forging Ploughshares

Exposing the “Powers”: Japan, Germany, and the United or Confederate States

I have long wanted to write a fact-based novel portraying what Walter Wink calls the “powers.”[1] The “powers” refers to the spirit or personality of a country or group of people which is larger than the sum total of its parts. The peculiar “spirit” or power I have encountered in both Japan and the United States is remarkable in its capacity to shape and blind people to their history (e.g. war crimes, the enslavement of other peoples) and as a result of this blindness to continue to oppress (and, of course, I am thinking of the present moment in this country in which the blindness to racism is being made evident).

Japanese citizens resemble those in post war Germany, in counting themselves the primary victims of their military and governmental leaders during World War II. Very few admit to any sort of guilt on the part of the Emperor, their own family, or within themselves. Though Germany also experienced this victim mentality, counting themselves the ultimate and worst victims of the war and portraying a blindness to the near universal support of Hitler, the philosopher, Susan Neiman, describes how Germans, over a period of decades, have confronted their past through memorials, official acts of remembrance, and reparations.[2] Otherwise Germans might see themselves as victims, on the order of Southerners who continue to imagine the lost cause of the Confederacy was just and heroic.

Even slight acquaintance with the history of the Confederate States dispels the pervasive narrative that the Civil War was about States’ Rights. The point of secession was, according to the Confederacy’s Vice President, Alexander Stephens, to correct the United States Constitution: “The Constitution… rested upon the equality of races. This was an error. Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” Stephens deploys biblical language, referring to Christ, to describe slavery as the cornerstone of Southern States: “This stone which was rejected by the first builders ‘is become the chief of the corner’—the real ‘corner-stone’—in our new edifice.” The reason for secession and the resulting war was to establish “a new government . . . upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” The Christian language deployed lends the strongest of terms to the religious-like commitment to slavery, which stood at the heart of the Confederacy.

Perhaps we would also witness defense of Nazi statuary and Nazi memorials, rather than holocaust memorials, if it weren’t for the particular history in East and West Germany which required the deconstruction of German history. Neiman traces the efforts of clergy, the publication of memoirs of survivors, the production of films and books, and the pressure of various government officials in efforts to change the narrative of “Germans as victims.” A growing self-awareness and broad German acknowledgment of complicity in the rise of Hitler has required a decades long struggle.

This self-awareness or any acknowledgement of corporate guilt is mostly missing in Japan, a blindness which is also intimately connected to the dominance of right-wing politics and attitudes in educational institutions and in the culture as a whole. The Japanese equivalent of Nazi memorials or Confederate statues is the Yasukuni Shrine commemorating Hideki Tojo (the wartime prime minister) and 13 other war criminals (along with millions of war dead) as Japanese deities. Nearly every government, since the end of the war, has worshipped at this shrine, marking the right leaning nationalism of post-war Japan. These same governments have continued to cover up war crimes, and have resisted text book entries which include “aggression in” China (it was, government representatives insist, an “advance”) and have instead focused on the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[3] While we were in Japan the Ministry of Education mandated the singing of the Kimigayo (the national anthem indicating the deity of the Emperor) before the Hinomaru (the national flag) at graduation and entrance ceremonies (which fits with right wing goals and a nationalist slant on Japanese history). State powers are at work in institutions, in corporate culture, often marked by peculiar cruelties in schools and in the workplace. The point being that personal attitudes, corporate attitudes, and the political reality of the country, are all quite interconnected and traceable in people’s daily lives.

In my would be historical fictional portrayal of my real experience of a small town, a psychoanalytic researcher is dispatched to Hartdale, Texas to diagnose how an entire community has become subject to a mysterious malign force. The specific phenomena developed in the research pertains to “research on violence and identity as a corporate and learned process.” What our intrepid researcher discovers, is that while the community imagines itself built on the redemptive act destroying the Bloody Benders (this part of the story is true – the Benders and their demise), this final act of violence, the very act related to the establishment of Hartdale, had a corporate and individual impact. The violence that “saved” Hartdale and the myths that surround this violence turns out to have slowly impacted the lives of many its citizens.

The point of this book that will never be written is that, given the right tools, I believe the story could be told of how the corporate personalities, the schools, the churches, the communities, in which we have our life can also be exposed in the ways they would destroy life. There is a hidden center, an idolatrous violence, which corruptly organizes the powers. This is most obvious among the “possessed,” those suffering PTSD, or those who commit acts of violence, as those subjected to violence and oppression bear traceable marks of their trauma. Lonnie Athens, in his doctoral studies, interviewed hundreds of violent criminals to arrive at a pattern which he calls “violentization.” He discovered that those who commit the worst forms of violence have themselves been exposed to consistent and predictable levels of violence as children. Would this not hold true for corporate personalities or to what Paul refers to as the principalities and powers, or those corporate personalities of states, towns, and smaller groups of people? They must bear a peculiar history that explains how they may have gone bad or become either good or demonic.

In Japan, religion is at stake in the worship at Yasukuni Shrine and in the peculiar religious nationalism surrounding the Hinomaru and Kimigayo. In Germany, it was clearly something on the order of a religious blindness that refused corporate acceptance of national complicity in the rise of National Socialism. In my real-fictional Hartdale it becomes possible to trace the genealogy of violence in a community founded on originary violence in individual lives. We want and perhaps require heroic ancestors, a heroic nation, or a heroic history. At the very least, we would see ourselves as victims of violence, rather than its perpetrators. Confrontation with this lie we would tell ourselves about our identity must be the essential part of what Paul describes as the exposure and witness to the principalities and powers.

The debate over Confederate statues and the Confederate flag concerns founding myths and how we order our lives and it raises the question of whether that history will be confronted and exposed or whether it will continue to support an ethos of violence and oppression.

[1] C.S. Lewis’ novel, That Hideous Strength, may be the sort of work I am thinking of but in my story the spiritual and fantastic would be replaced by more ordinary developments (which probably would not make for a very good novel).

[2] Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, See https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-to-confront-a-racist-national-history

[3] Through the life-long efforts of Saburo Ienaga the most widely used Japanese textbooks in the mid- and late-1990s contained references to the Nanjing Massacre, anti-Japanese resistance movements in Korea, forced suicide in Okinawa, comfort women, and Unit 731 (responsible for conducting medical experiments on prisoners of war)—all issues raised in Ienaga’s suits.

Eucharist as The Counter to Thanksgiving

The seemingly benign aspect of Thanksgiving, a eucharistic like thanksgiving meal incorporating all the elements of American religion, functions as something just short of myth. The meal celebrates the great good will of Pilgrims embracing God’s good earth and her native people sharing together in the plenteous bounty of an emerging millennial kingdom. Here, at its beginning is the Eden of the American experience in which nature meets grace. Of course, it wasn’t until around the time of the American Revolution that the name “Pilgrims” came to be associated with the settlers, at which time they became symbolic of the American faith. (The name itself a false description implying mere pilgrims on a religious pilgrimage across a new holy land.) Myth conjoined with national identity may appear benign only from the perspective of belief. The blood and soil of Germany or the folk myths of Japan function in a role of invented tradition which demonstrate the dark side of the founding myths of the nation-state.

The Meiji Restoration, in Japan, puts on full display the necessity of having something to restore as the unifying element which would form the core doctrine of the modern ideology. The Kojiki, with its depiction of the emperor descended from the Sun Goddess, served as the myth to give divine dignity to the newly emerging Japanese identity. The emperor restored to centrality is putting God “back” in the center of a socio-political system which must posit the reified element from which it emerges. Though there cannot be said to be a “Japanese” identity until it is forged in the modern period, for the identity to function it must have eternal roots in the mythical past. The tradition does not predate the modern practices but the legacy is a necessity to obtain a unified ideology and population. The Emperor was not only the center of a new identity but would be the means of mobilizing the population in a religious world war. Japanese, German, and American identity are built upon imagined communities, the stories of which are contested, quite literally, on the world stage. The modern needs the imagined myth from which to forge the common culture, but by definition the shared values of the nation (constituting a religious-like identity) cannot tolerate counter-myth.

In the description of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, what Germany lacked at the end of World War I was an enduring subject or identity, and the Nazi notion of an Aryan race filled in this mythical role. Nazism as Alfred Rosenberg says, is a resuscitation or restoration of Odin (Odin is the God of wisdom, poetry, death, divination and magic). Odin is dead but as essence of the German soul Odin is resuscitated in National Socialism. The height of German thought “restored” by Nazism forges an identity from out of a mythic Aryanism, setting up the ideology of restoration and return.

The deadly aspect of the myth is that pure humanity is gained in differentiation and contrast with its polluted present identity. Just as the Japanese is precisely not Christian, the German Aryan is precisely not Jewish. In Hitler’s description, the Jew is not simply a bad race, a defective type: he is the antitype, the bastard par excellence as he has no culture of his own. He is man in the abstract, as opposed to the man of singular, concrete identity forged from the blood and soil of Germany. The race linked to blood is repeated endlessly by Hitler. Blood is nature, it is natural selection; the material sign of a “will of nature” (Mein Kampf, pp. 390, 581), which is the will to difference, to distinction, to individuation.

Both the Aryan and Japanese myth focus on the Sun, the gestalt for distinction and sight serving as the backdrop for all forms of differentiation. Roman Emperor worship likewise was connected to Sun worship (the Unconquerable Sun, Sol Invictus, later identified with the Emperor). The Jews invoke the Roman Emperor at the trial of Jesus (“We have no King but Caesar”), and as they are swept up into cultic state identity they sacrifice the Jewish Messiah. The will to power, the power of distinction and difference represented in the mythological Sun gods, is the original National identity. The Aryans, the Japanese, the Americans, the Jews, give rise to cultures which bear, in Hitler’s words, “the inner features of their character” (MK, p. 400). The delineation of this character is etched in the blood, the Other must die that the Volk, the nation, would be formed.

The colonists were not innocent refugees, mere pilgrims, as by 1620 hundreds of Native people had already been to England and back, mostly as captives. This unimproved – formless people (Hitler’s depiction of the Jews often echoes in descriptions of the Natives) were “wild,” mere roving heathens, and the land they occupied open for the taking. The Separatists and Puritans constituting the “Pilgrims” were, from the beginning, intending to take the land away from its Native inhabitants and establish a new “Holy Kingdom.” In a Thanksgiving sermon delivered at Plymouth in 1623, Cotton Mather praised God for the smallpox epidemic that wiped out the majority of the Wampanoag people who had been their fellow diners at Thanksgiving. This blood for which Mather gives thanks is “chiefly young men and children, the very seeds of increase, thus clearing the forests to make way for better growth.” The sacrifice of the Wampanoag is the divine opening of the new kingdom.

Sorting out myth and truth surrounding Thanksgiving may be aided in pitting the Eucharistic thanksgiving meal against American Thanksgiving. Both are meals expressing thanks for the abundance of the earth in providing food. The use of bread and wine as signs of gratitude, employed by Jesus, are first seen when the priest Melchizedek offered bread and wine to thank God the creator for the fruits of the earth (Gen. 14:18-20). In both meals, thanks is offered in the midst of an impending death. The Words of Institution of the Lord’s Supper are: “He took the bread, and giving thanks, broke it,” and, “He took the cup, and once more giving thanks, he gave it to his disciples” (see Lk 22:19, 17 and 1 Cor 11:24). The impending death is not hidden or mythologized by the meal but accentuated. Jesus alludes to his death and to the traitor in their midst. There is an inherently demythologizing element in the discussion of betrayal, death, sacrificial servitude, and the reversal of nation building in the Lord’s Supper.

Included in American Thanksgiving are all the elements of myth (in a Girardian sense) covering over the genocidal inclinations, the unfolding betrayal, the sacralizing of those betrayed, all of this already present in the hearts of the “Pilgrims.” (Even the beloved corn of the sacred tradition was stolen from the natives, along with many “pretty” items taken from Wampanoag graves.) The American myth hides the death dealing intentions of the “Pilgrims.” Christ exposes the death dealing nature of these “inner features” (Hitler’s depiction) and this is the original Gospel message: “Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). The true thanksgiving exposes the murderous complicity in the invented myth underlying nation building.

The great irony of the American Myth is that it defangs Eucharist and Church by enfolding it into the founding of America. On the Manataka American Indian Council website it notes the mythic element to each part of the Thanksgiving story, ending by noting the possibility that the myth about the “Pilgrims” landing on a “Rock” (they did not land at Plymouth Rock) originated as a reference to the New Testament in which Jesus says to Peter, “And I say also unto thee, Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church and the Gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matthew 16:18) The appeal to these scriptures gives credence to the sanctity of colonization and the divine destiny of the dominant culture.

At a minimum the myth surrounding Thanksgiving should not be accepted as benign storytelling, as from such myths religious identities are forged.

Can Nations be Christian?

The following is a guest blog by David Rawls.

A few years ago, I visited Washington D.C. again, having been to our nation’s capital probably a half dozen times. I am always taken aback by its history and its architecture. On this last visit I was admiring the Jefferson Memorial, a tribute to one of our country’s founding fathers and our third president. What caught my attention were the inscriptions inside of the memorial. Many of them were references to God. One such quote reads,

God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.

The Jefferson memorial is not the only place where scripture or references to God are inscribed. The Washington Monument also has scripture verses and references to God. One could do a search of the whole city and find thousands of references to God. Our very Declaration of Independence says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

With all these references to God and the faith of some of our founding fathers it makes sense that many believe America is a “Christian nation.” Yet can any nation actually be Christian? Does calling a nation Christian make it Christian? The question can only be answered by discerning what it really means to be Christian.

The term “Christian” was first used at the church in Antioch. It is quite possible that these earlier followers of Jesus did not call themselves Christians, but it was name the community gave to the church because they saw that these people followed Jesus. The word “Christian” simply means “little Christ.” The city of Antioch called Jesus-followers “Little Christs” because they saw the people of the church imitating the life and ethics of Jesus. This labeling by the community of Antioch is important because it gives us a huge clue to what it means to be Christian. The Christian then, is one who has allegiance to the teachings and person of Jesus and seeks to imitate these teachings. This core is easily seen in other New Testament passages. Here are just a few examples.

Throughout Jesus’ ministry he called people to deny themselves and take up their cross and follow him. (Matthew 10:38; Matthew 16:24; Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23; Luke 14:27). In what we call the great commission in Matthew 28:18-20 Jesus says,

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.

In all these passages we see the theme of allegiance and imitation of Jesus as essential to being a Christian.

The Apostle Paul understood that allegiance and imitation were key to what it meant to be Christian. It could be said that at the heart of his letter to the Corinthian church, with its many problems and issues, was the question, “What does it mean to be Christian?”. Paul answers this decisively when he tells the church in 1 Corinthians 11:1 “Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ.” Paul was saying that being a Christian means following Jesus.

This idea was not unique to Paul. Peter says in 1 Peter 2:21, “For you have been called for this purpose, since Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example for you to follow in His steps.” The apostle John would say in 1 John 2:6, “the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked.” Jesus’ brother James would insist that being a follower of Jesus was not simply a matter of intellectual belief but had everything to do with imitating Jesus’ ways and life. He would say in James 2:14ff that faith without action (imitation of Jesus) was dead. The New Testament seems to be clear that to be Christian one must have allegiance to Jesus and imitate his ways. So, can nations be Christian?

The easiest way to answer this question is to explore whether any nation has ever demonstrated allegiance to Jesus and sought to imitate his ways. We need to be careful not to make the mistake of thinking that just because people want to be a Christian nation or desire that such a nation exist that it means it is Christian. A duckling can grow up with dogs and even believe that it is a dog, but even though it tries to behave like a dog, tries to do dog-like things, it can never be a dog. It is still a duck. Throughout history nations have called themselves Christian, have claimed to do Christian-like things, but this does not mean they are Christian. I believe that if we honestly evaluate what is at the heart of nation state, we must say they can never be Christian. Though some certainly believe themselves to be Christian, they can never be Christian. Christianity is reserved for those who imitate Christ and follow him. Let me give you an example of a nation seeking to be Christian and believing their cause to be Christian.

During World War 2 one of the main leaders of a country who called themselves a Christian nation said this,

In this hour I would ask of the Lord God only this: that He would give His blessing to our work, and that He may ever give us the courage to do the right. I am convinced that men who are created by God should live in accordance with the will of the Almighty. No man can fashion world history unless upon his purpose and his power there rest the blessings of this Providence.

It is clear that this person believed their cause and their nation was Christian. So, who said this? Franklin Roosevelt? Winston Churchill? We might easily believe it to be either, but these words were, in fact, spoken by Adolf Hitler. Hopefully it’s obvious that Nazi Germany was not a truly “Christian” nation. They neither followed the words of Jesus or sought to imitate him.

But, can America be the exception?

Again, the criteria we are looking for is following Jesus and imitating him. Certainly, many Americans believe the nation to be Christian based on superficial statements like saying we are “under God,” but words are not as important as actions (thinking you’re a duck does not make you a duck). One only has to look throughout our nation’s history to see that, as a nation, we have not followed Jesus, nor have we imitated him.

This is not meant to be overly harsh, but to demonstrate that nations can never be Christian because nations have different interests and agendas. Nations cannot imitate Christ partly because to do so they may cease to exist as nations. If the heart of being a Christian is loving one’s enemies, then it is safe to say that America and all other nations have never been Christian. America has always had enemies and even though we invite them to join us and we might even to seek to love them it is only when they seek to serve our interests.

Christians, on the other hand, are to love their enemies regardless of their actions or intentions. If Christians are called to put down the sword, then it is evident that America is not Christian. America and all other nations use the sword to keep people in line and even at times (unknowingly) may be agents of Gods plans. If Christians are to be “just people” then one can look at American history and see it has not been just. The stain of slavery and the inequality of women and minorities are just a few examples of our injustice. Justice for all is a great dream for America and one we should strive for but it has never been realized and since nations are part of the fallen world, they never will achieve this goal.

It is my prayer in writing this blog that the reader will agree that nations cannot be Christian. Only the church can be Christian. I love the nation I live in. I want to be a blessing to it and even strive to live out my Christianity in it. Hopefully Christians see that the only nation which is Christian is the Jesus nation. This nation is a nation which has no borders and is without enemies of the flesh, but is a people who seek to imitate and follow the one leader: Jesus.

The Limitations of Infernalism, Annihilationism, and Universalism

It is not entirely clear how justice might be rendered and the world set right but this is the Christian hope. By “not clear” I mean that the proper understanding of the biblical images of a narrow way, cosmic redemption, punishment of the wicked, eternal fire, the defeat of sin and death, etc., does not resolve into anything approaching full explanation and, I presume, is not supposed to. Part of what hope consists of, in its admitted (and by definition) incapacity to see, is that there are impenetrable categories posing resolutions to overwhelming problems that escape finite imagination and articulation. Biblical imagery of heaven, hell, and the intermediate state of the dead, is simply that – imagery not meant to serve as exhaustive explanation. It is not only that the abyss runs white hot and cold (outer darkness) or that its opposite includes the entire cosmos (all, everyone, everything) narrowed down to a few select individuals, but these categories made to bear too heavy a weight corrupt the explanation, clarity, and primary point of the Gospel. The New Testament is focused on a practical, present tense explanation of salvation, inclusive of an ethic – life in the body – and an insight into the human predicament, which is evacuated of meaning when the primary focus is put on future categories, whatever they might be (which is not to deny the necessity of better understanding these categories). This is clearest in the case of infernalism (eternal, conscious, torturous existence) but the same point holds for every position regarding the future estate.

Infernalism is connected to various images (it is mistakenly connected to hades – which is the place of the dead) but usually with gehenna or the lake of fire. The problem is, the New Testament nowhere describes the Cross as addressing the category of gehenna or the lake of fire. Yet conceived as the primary human problem, Christ is thought to bear eternal suffering in hell on the Cross. This makes suffering and death otherworldly spiritual categories, and since Christ’s suffering in this understanding is inward (eternal, heavenly/hellish suffering for and before God) he could undergo this spiritual suffering without incarnation. To follow this logic will land one just short of the antiChrist position of denying that Christ came in the flesh – here he simply need not have come in the flesh.

Though the innate immortality of the soul need not be posited along with infernalism it usually is, for obvious (and less so) reasons. To imagine God simultaneously sustaining and torturing in hell forever may be disturbing to those not weaned on Calvin’s understanding that God’s love is an anthropomorphism of the saved, trumped by his hate toward the damned. Indestructibility is apparently our fall back position as portrayed in both the Bible and psychology. Though the serpent or Satan is behind the idea (in Genesis, Hebrews, Romans), better (so goes the lie) to bear a spark of immortality rather than to imagine God alone is immortal (though Paul says as much to Timothy). Freud maintained there is no mortality in the human unconscious.

Infernalism displaces the biblical focus on Christ’s actual death and his encounter with real world evil of the human kind (that killed him). Salvation, love, heaven, election, or nearly any other key biblical term will bear a very different semantic load if God is eternally angry and salvation is from his wrath for a few luckily chosen or choosing individuals. The goodness of this God is suspect and the redemption proposed would be blissful only for those who delight in the torture of others. In hell, as eternal torturous existence, wrath is on a continuum in the divine nature coexisting forever with love, though Scripture tells us just the opposite.[1]

Annihilationism is an improvement, in many respects, over infernalism: Jesus speaks of a final judgment primarily employing metaphors of annihilation like the “burning of chaff or brambles in ovens,” or the “final destruction of body and soul in the Valley of Hinnom.” Paul indicates as much: “Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If any man destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him” (1 Co 3:11–17). Peter concurs: “But these, as natural brute beasts, made to be taken and destroyed, speak evil of the things that they understand not; and shall utterly perish in their own corruption” (2 Peter 2:12, KJV). The predominant O.T. picture is of the wicked being brought to nothing (a few examples must suffice): “For they will wither quickly like the grass and fade like the green herb” (Psalm 37:2). “Evildoers will be cut off . . . the wicked will perish . . . They vanish—like smoke they vanish away” (Psalm 37:9,20).” “‘For behold, the day is coming, burning like a furnace; and all the arrogant and every evildoer will be chaff; and the day that is coming will set them ablaze,’ says the Lord of hosts, ‘so that it will leave them neither root nor branch’” (Malachi 4:1).

Annihilationism fits into a continuum with the living death of sin, with death as a visible result of the Fall – finalized in the annihilation of judgment and Christ’s defeat of death. Infernalism creates a cosmological dualism in which the victory of Christ brings resolution for some but leaves evil and rebellion in place in hell. The eternally burning inferno would seem, as Calvin supposed, to make God’s wrath primary and to throw into question the “cosmic” fullness of Christ’s victory. Augustine proposes that it was a necessity to have an eternal torturous hell so that one could understand the difference of being in heaven. Tertullian, before him, speaks of the saved relishing the sight of the destruction of the reprobate. Aquinas asserts that the vision of hellish torments increases the beatitude of the redeemed. As Augustine describes it, looking upon the punishments they have evaded helps the redeemed to more richly realize divine grace. It seems there is no place for mercy, pity, empathy, or human decency in a heaven dependent upon hell. Strangely, none note that it is precisely this knowledge built on difference (the knowledge of good and evil) that is fallen.

With annihilationism, death as being cut off from life with God, has its definitive end in Christ’s defeat of death or in the obliteration of dying. Is there a contradiction though, in saying death is definitively defeated if some are dead forever? One might object that annihilation partly shares in the problem of infernalism, in that Christ’s victory cannot be said to be decisive and complete for all. God might be said to be “all in all” (I Cor. 15:28) but not for all. Perhaps nonexistence is not a counter to all in that it is a discontinuous category, though this doesn’t seem to quite work.

This leaves the option of universalism, which would seem to have its support in the continual New Testament refrain that salvation has come to all: God is the savior of all people (I Timothy 4:10). “For God has shut up all in disobedience so that He may show mercy to all” (Romans 11:32). “So then as through one transgression there resulted condemnation to all men, even so through one act of righteousness there resulted justification of life to all men” (Romans 5:18). “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men” (Titus 2:11). “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive” (I Corinthians 15:22). “And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself” (John 12:32). “. . . making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:9-10, ESV). There are some 40 verses that clearly indicate the cosmic, universal, all-inclusive nature of salvation. Some form of universalism would seem to be undeniable, and I do not mean those forms that squeeze “all” down to a few.

The danger with universalism is that it would seem to reduce to insignificance the struggles, suffering, choices, and injustices, involved in the reality of life. Certainly, a fluffy, cheap universalism, which would overlook the oppressive nature of evil for bromides of sentimental morality reduces the Christian religion to chicken soup for the soul. Wouldn’t it have been better to save the candle of human struggle if the flame of salvation brightens all? What is the point, the explanation, the reason? Universalism may set forth some sort of soul-making explanation – a grand lesson with no real consequences – but this will not do.

My point with annihilationism and universalism is not to simply dismiss them as inadequate. Infernalism, annihilationism, or universalism (either the cotton candy gnostic kind, or a morally responsible kind), are certainly not equal and need to be sorted out, but the danger is that the imagery of future things is made to bear explanatory weight where the New Testament offers imagery and not explanation. There is progress to be made in recognizing the perversion entailed in infernalism, the role of annihilation, and the clear teaching of a cosmic/universal salvation. The danger though, is to confuse a more just biblical imagery of future eternal categories with explanation. A better understanding may explain more but it is not the role of any image of the future estate of the damned and saved to sum up explanation and understanding. In fact, a key criterion in arriving at the best understanding is that it allows for the fulness of the biblical focus on a lived salvation.

The end of discussion on the teaching of the New Testament about the intermediate state of the dead, future rewards and punishment, the extent of salvation, should not confuse a better understanding with a full understanding or imagine that this sums up the focus of the New Testament. For example, it may be that one concludes that annihilation is the primary teaching of the New Testament and better fits a loving image of God and best explains biblical imagery of final destruction. This may be a better explanation, but does annihilation provide final resolution to issues of justice or play the role of a theodicy? Does universalism serve any better? The death of six million Jews in Hitler’s gas chambers is not going to be explained, justified, or understood, whatever future estate you might imagine for Adolph, be it conscious torture in hell forever, annihilation, or redemption. Meningitis, rat lung worms, tooth decay, cancer, the suffering of the innocent, the existence of evil, or Hitler, do not fall within the spectrum of understanding and practical action which is the primary explanatory point of the New Testament – though it may touch on all of these issues. Of course, this practical salvation is best served by correctly delineating end time imagery but this image does not serve in place of a lived deliverance from the shackles of sin.

[1] “For a brief moment I forsook you, but with great compassion I will gather you. He will not always chide: neither will he keep his anger forever” (Isaiah 54:7-8). “In an outburst of anger, I hid My face from you for a moment, but with everlasting lovingkindness I will have compassion on you” (Psalm 103:9,17). “He will revive us after two days; He will raise us up on the third day, that we may live before Him” (Hosea 6:2).