[Music] [Music] hello Jesus Trippers I'm your host John Crowder and I want you to know creation is not a cosmic accident that spun out of God's control the Holy Trinity wasn't caught by surprise at Adam's fall now working feverishly to save the willing but impotent to salvage the doomed masses who reject him nor did the Lord knowingly design rational creatures which he intended to suffer forever in hell for his own Glory that is not the gospel the gospel tells us the end is like the beginning but better so I come to you today with the
good news of the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world the living God who is the savior of all people especially those who believe 1 Timothy 4:10 today we're kicking off a hot new 10p part series for you on the Bible belt's favorite topic hell and Beyond I'm calling this series The consuming fire in homage of the great George McDonald and this first episode is titled apocatastasis it's a big Greek Biblical word meaning the restoration of all things apocatastasis it's a term heavily used by the early church it's it's found in
Peter's sermon in the book of Acts 3: 21 Jesus the Christ whom Heaven Must receive until the time of the restoration of all things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from ancient time judgment is never ultimate in the prophets only penultimate it is always followed by restoration and a thing restored is better than its original condition of course the church fathers connected apocatastasis to Paul's assertion in 1 Corinthians 15 that The Last Enemy to be destroyed is death and all things will be put in subjection under him that God may
be all in all all things in complete synchronicity with the logos every knee bowing every tongue confessing before we dive in this is going to be difficult if our fundamental construct of the Gospel is still based on a retributive law God who has been paid off by the death of Jesus a transactional courtroom model that's intrinsically legalistic rather than the christological trinitarian view of God that the early fathers had so before we jump from the frying pan into the Hellfire I might recommend that you first search back through YouTube and watch my most recent 10art
series it's called Covenant versus contract give you a little bit better of a foundation we must see the gospel as father son and spirit coming to meet us in our darkness in our lowest hell pledging themselves to us and unconditional love and unswerving Fidelity in order to cure us from our headlong spiral into the disease of sin death and non-being if we don't get Jesus and his father right then there's no way in hell we're going to accurately understand hell there's a difference between the wrath of a father and the wrath of an executioner do
we have a God who looks like Jesus or do we have some other God who we think Jesus is saving us from is Jesus really Lord I also realize this topic triggers people I have no desire to argue with people over the nature of hell but what I am going to be doing is dismantling the so-called Eternal conscious torment version of hell no evil is eternal and my own beliefs have significantly evolved over the past 15 years on this topic in fact I've even pulled down my own videos from five years ago I'm always growing
in this hell perhaps more than any other topic hits our deepest trauma reflexes and ordinarily nice people just get enraged if they think you're writing off the hell that they so know and love I mean the whole limic system of the brain seizes up with this fight ORF flight response what about this verse this verse this verse as if theology is done with battling lists of proof texts there is something more important than what the Bible says and that would be what the Bible actually says not what you've been culturally conditioned to believe after 15500
years of Dark Ages and Latin translations that influence our English Renditions of scripture we've got 10 sessions to get through all the relevant verses so if some of you are already getting triggered just take a deep breath because often we say stretch me Lord stretch me Lord but then he does it we go whoa not that way so I pray the Lord settles our hellish demons for this series so we can hear not New Perspectives but some much much older ones perhaps you can give not just me but yourself a little bit of respect in
acknowledging that yes of course I've read the Bible a lot I mean getting in the feed and just listing off all the hell verses like a doofus isn't helping anyone brother I've read those in the Greek if you're expecting me to wow never saw that before you mean hell is real I already believe hell is real the question really is what version of hell are we ascribing to and if you're afraid I'm a Universalist look if you take Paul seriously you'd better at least flirt with universalism I love that word but that word triggers people
because it has a lot of varieties universalism is a spectrum and I'm most definitely on the Spectrum but folks just write you off when they hear the U word that's the flight reaction in the fight ORF flight because they think somewhere in church history universalism was deemed a heresy quite the opposite belief in apocatastasis was the majority view of the first 500 years of church history now if you think by universalism one is saying there is no hell or or that salvation is something that happens apart from Christ as if Jesus is irrelevant well that's
not only absurd it just shows the majority of evangelicals simply haven't studied this much salvation is not a ticket to Heaven out of hell it's Union it's adoption it's relationship in the Triune God Jesus Is God how are you going to have a relationship with God apart from Jesus that's who he is the question is whether Jesus is successful or capable in his mission to save the human race or did just sort of half asset the church fathers and mothers the patristics they saw from scripture what we call hell as an all consuming fire of
God's love that was corrective and restorative uh they read the Old Testament too which modern evangelicals don't but anyway all these words hell universalism they're all loaded terms that mean a lot of things to a lot of different people and we're going to be redefining it all in an older more christological key and I'm not making anything up here I'm actually appealing to the great tradition on this subject so the battle that lies before some of us over this series is to hear what I'm saying and not what you think I'm saying such a topic
is so divisive so fraught with misconception it's going to take me 10 sessions to address it comprehensively what many call the traditional view of hell is actually a product of the Middle Ages not the Primitive church I've spent too many years theologically honed in on this topic that I can tell when someone just looked it up five minutes ago on Wikipedia and my heart and mind are settled everyone's free to make up their mind you can't call someone a heretic over this though because this is an in-house discussion and contrary to popular belief no church
Council has ever deemed universalism a heresy no the fifth ecumenical council did not we'll be diving into all the history trust me the difference is that we're going to be looking at a more truly gospel oriented view of Hell one that the majority of the earliest fathers adhered to rather than a pagan view of hell that emerged much later but believing one way or another on this topic it doesn't make someone a pagan okay and this is not as simple as the fundamentalist notion you know the Bible says it and that settles it because the
Greek fathers they read the scripture much better than any modern hack quoting an English commentary which we call the Bible I mean we hardly recognize we've even been conditioned by centuries of Roman law Latin not Greek but latin-based study of scripture if you're Protestant you've been almost completely disconnected from the majority teaching of the early church we think the church began in 1517 with Martin Luther maybe we cut our teeth on God TV or the Southern Baptist convention but the one father that our system has built upon was Augustine who spoke Latin not Greek who
taught separation thinking and the the Eternal conscious torment view of Hell which he acknowledged was not even the majority view of Believers back in his day so over the course of this series we're going to look into what origin Gregory of Nissa the capian fathers Ambrose Isaac the Syrian what they had to say about this aanus eus mccr the younger Clement of Alexandria Theodore of mesta didus the blind Maximus the Confessor and countless other pivotal fathers and mothers of the early church who were either full-blown or had strong Universalist leanings that hell is corrective that
it is severe but it still has a Terminus an ending that it is the work of the father's allc consuming fire of love now I don't care what no cidian father say Pastor Bob down at the Revival told me I'm want to roast on a spit till the cows come home I mean that that's how people I've had conversations like this with people our modern American folk religion has left us not only theolog IC Ally bankrupt but morally bankrupt and we're told in The Sermon on the Mount to love our enemies but are called to
follow and emulate a God who consciously tortures his enemies For Eternity for their finite Earthly sins he gives them over to NeverEnding infinite punishment it's morally reprehensible for many people the concept of eternal hell often presents a massive cognitive dissonance between our supposed belief in a god who's good who is love uh does God God no longer look like Jesus who dies for his enemies but instead chooses to torment them forever David Bentley Hart writes a belief does not Merit unconditional reverence just because it's old or because its proponents claim a Divine Authority for it
that they cannot prove neither should it be immune to being challenged in terms commensurate to the Scandal it poses because unending eternal hell is so flagrantly broadcast as a supposed essential to the Christian faith we need equally strong voices with coonies enough not to care about offerings and speaking invitations to correct this psychotic spiritually corrosive driil Hart says in truth the notion of eternal torment is so unquestionably resplendant warped and irrational that every defense of it ever made throughout the whole of Christian history has been a bad one now like Hart whose amazing book that
all shall be saved I highly recommend required reading on this topic like him I believe the eternal torment view of hell is communal self-deception it is collective derangement promoted by moral idiocy disguised as spiritual subtlety of some Divine mysterious Paradox when in actuality it is a fundamental contradiction to the god of love we see revealed in Jesus with heart I believe it should be tossed as quote degrading nonsense and rejected by anyone with quote a properly functioning moral intelligence there is indeed a hell and outside the party and outside the gates but I adamantly reject
that even one Soul could be irrevocably lost forever it is pathological and Hart rightly notes that while most Christians who give lip service to eternal hell they they don't really believe it deep down unless they're religious Psychopaths who were psychologically diseased and to suggest that a nihilation is a feasible option you know that God would just snuff people out well that just makes him a mass murderer while eternal hell makes him a sadistic torturer now I appreciate Hart's feistiness I like some saltiness no one should be apologetic for dismissing such a moral absurdity as eternal
hell Hart says I regard the tale we have been told to be a form of emotional psychological abuse and the form of what is transparently a story whose inner spring is moral idiocy so I would say be defiant and ill-mannered the way I am don't try to moderate your convictions don't apologize for them and certainly don't act as if the alternative story is the more plausible story or the more scripturally likely and that you're the strange and exotic figure in this debate start from the presupposition that everyone else is insane you'll be fine now all
that said I also want to be charitable to those who haven't had the proper Revelation on this yet and I don't want to Short Circuit people's process I know for me this was a long journey I grew up brainwashed in a Hellfire Brimstone legalistic Church from the age of seven with a constant despairing morose for boing fear of hell so you think I haven't read the text that I'm flippantly arriving at this conclusion as a full-time Minister for 20 years you think I haven't read the hell passages I mean besides the Greek of collect 200
different English translations of the scriptures I spent 27 years of my life as an infernal and then after much lifechanging study and just gospel Revelation I I came to a hopeful universalism I wrote my first uh book on this topic Cosmos reborn which is a good segue book um I tossed the Eternal conscious torment view but what really convinced me was the christology not just individual Bible verses Jesus Christ is the last Adam who vicariously represents the human race for as in Adam all die so in Christ all will be made alive 1 Corinthians 15:22
it's all over the place when you see it I mean within four verses from Colossians 1:1 16-20 Paul tells us Jesus Christ is the creator of all things the sustainer of all things and the reconciler of all things I realized that hell was a wrong relation to the fire of God's love and I was still processing however the so-called Free Will defense of hell you know holding out the remotest of possibilities that some may reject Christ forever but Jesus would never give up on them he already had United himself to them in the Incarnation God
wasn't actively torturing people they were tortured by their own rejection of him by the all-consuming fire of his presence so I held on to what would be called the CS Lewis notion you know that the doors of hell are locked from the inside God's not sending people there and so for about a decade I remained in that hopeful Universalist camp and this hope for the Salvation of all is not Pie in the Sky okay it's it's not just allowed this hope is commanded even God has this hope not wanting anyone to perish but everyone to
come to repentance second Peter 3 and he quote wants all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth 2 Timothy 2:4 I hesitated to be too confident because I felt that verged into dogmatism like the great Catholic Theologian Hans ERS Von Balthazar I felt we should stay in what he called the humility of hope not making dogmatic assertions about the afterlife because there's mystery here but becoming uh say confident in a hope that's not a lack of humility in some circles it's called faith and after a decade of teaching extensively on
this hope the more My Views evolved already I didn't believe in Eternal conscious t torment but even the possibility or plausibility that some would reject Christ forever it became utter nonsense I no longer believe the love of God is ultimately resistible God Saves us God births faith in God he's neither incapable nor unwilling to transform and heal the will of all of his children no matter how long it takes he's the only one who can he wants to so he will so call me a dogmatic Universalist a confident Universalist somewhere along the way these lines
between Hope and Faith began to blur these labels of hopeful or confident universalism they can be fuzzy and arbitrary even many who give a nod to eternal hell still have a fuzzy if not secretive hope at least a funerals and my heart during my decade of being a hopeful Universalist I was still pretty damned convinced that no one would be eternally damned so if this is all new to you um at least a hope for humanity is a good place to start if you have a soul anyway if you don't have that hope if you
want people to burn forever we'll guess where you're probably going so several years back I realized I had actually become a convinced a convinced Universalist convinced in the reality of apocatastasis that everyone will come to faith in Christ at some point that hell has a Terminus my only struggle was with that one verse that says if you don't receive Jesus before you die you automatically go to hell for forever and I think that is in second misconceptions chapter 3 I mean the shame of evangelicalism with that being their most foundational Doctrine you would think there
would be one single flipping Bible verse that says that no just the opposite in scripture we see Christ preaching to the dead souls in prison who were judged In the Flesh that they might live according to the spirit and I I will say this though I I I can confidently say that I do believe everything the apostle Paul says about eternal conscious torment and that would be well absolutely nothing we have some mishandled parables in the gospels but nothing in Paul and even in the gospels that ridiculous myth that Jesus spoke more about hell than
Heaven which he didn't there's not even a word for hell in the Greek and John brings it up nowhere so his heart points out what is definitely not there absolutely clearly not in Paul and that would definitely be in Paul given the gravity of the concern that it should evoke is the notion of eternal torment for Paul Christ came to save us from death dissolution and destruction but if he actually believed in a state of Eternal postmortem suffering it would have been rather colossally silly of him never to have mentioned it it is not there
because he was unaware of the idea and he was unaware because the idea is nonsense well John you can't make an argument from Silence just because Paul doesn't mention it doesn't mean that eternal hell doesn't exist but didn't Paul say that he did not shrink back from declaring to us the whole Gospel of God I kept nothing back that would be profitable to you I have fully proclaimed it seems quite careless of him out of all those letters to have left out one mention of eternal torment since he wrote 2third of the New Testament anyway
this is just an intro today I'm giving you my journey over time my appeal to mystery and just hoping for a good end of the story wasn't really based on good theologic and along the way I actually lost my precious youngest son Ezekiel that further cemented me I think in the heart of the father it highlighted the utter depravity of such an idea of unending torment of God's children and this idea that eternal hell is needed to scare people from living dissolute sinful lives that's ridiculous it just puts people in fearful self-preservation mode I remember
talking to my oldest son Jonas about apocatastasis and it's like the the lights came on the the whole Gospel made sense he he said how have I never heard this before and ever since he's just been on fire with his faith he's sharing good news not just with pre-b Believers but with Christians whom he calls hopeful infernals for years I still held out what Carl Bart called The Impossible possibility that someone could still refuse God's love forever but now I see that as complete unbiblical nonsense and Bart was being inconsistent with the rest of his
own theology which was overwhelmingly universalistic so yeah call me a dogmatic Universalist dogmatic sounds like you're being an overconfident jerk but Dogma just means belief dogmatics have to do with what we believe we're dogmatic about the resurrection of Jesus but we haven't seen it with our own eyes where's the line between hope and belief we tend to draw hard lines where hard lines don't exist and I'm guilty of doing that myself but this topic is marred with all manner of misconceptions by modern Minds dumb questions such as why even preach the gospel or folks think
you're saying all roads lead to Rome or whatever or again if by Universalist you means someone who doesn't believe in hell at all the majority of Christian universalists do believe in hell but it is a Redemptive restorative view not Eternal torture but if by Universalist you mean it is unimportant what you believe about Jesus that that's just ridiculous Christian universalists generally have a higher view of Christ because they don't view him as a moral degenerate tormenting people eternally for finite Earthly sins and calling that Justice rather he is the lover and Redeemer of all mankind
whose work is more successful because it was effective for all Humanity the loss of one soul from his perspective would have been a failed mission for the Good Shepherd who leaves the 99 to pursue the one at no point does the Good Shepherd cease his pursuit of the lost sheep at no point does he cease being their Shepherd at no point does he cease being good and the Sheep by the way do nothing to be found the only prerequisite for the lost sheep to be found is to be lost in the first place every sheep
though lost never loses its value to the shepherd well stop talking all clever there John hail's in the Bible hail Bible hail Bible I mean no Virginia hell is not in the Bible that's a word that came from Pagan Norse mythology from Germanic Barbarian Greek and Hebrew have an array of words with nuanced meanings Hades gehenna Tartarus sh and for convenience say sure we'll use the collective term for he you know hell in much of our discussion but it must be radically redefined it is a severe but corrective and restorative reality the militant ignorance of
fundamentalism keeps so many locked in a version of the afterlife that was hardly known to the early church those who actually read the Greek and were the closest generations to the writers of scripture why do they come to radically different conclusions in their view of Hell than modern infernals who think literal people are literally burning in literal Flames Forever by a loving father for instance the term eternal torment Eternal punishment is ionion colesis it's age of Correction not ideos tamoria Eternal punishment the Greek fathers knew their own language but will'll Exige scriptures in future episodes
I'm just giving an overview again today so I'd like to say there probably five main points for me that brought me from a hopeful to a convinced position on these matters and these Five Points were first of all biblical moral uh logical most more clearly theological and then the patristic historical understanding of this but the most important of all foremost christological so let me just run through these biblically I'm convinced that the overwhelming weight of the scriptures support Universal Cosmic Victory the victory of Christ for the whole of humanity even the hardest judgment passages from
Christ and in the prophets are not about retribution but restoration and we're going to dive into these more and coming episodes we'll talk about Jesus's judgment Parables the Lake of Fire in Revelation the sheep and the goats the wheat and the tears as well as all of the Universalist all passages that evangelicals con veniently ignore and as far as the moral argument we've touched on this I mean if you think eternal hell is remotely ethical or try to excuse it as some subtle spiritual Paradox just saying his ways are higher than our ways it is
not some profound mystery it is moral stupidity the father is not Molech burning his children enacting something we wouldn't wish on a dog or On Our Own Worst Enemy but somehow it's okay because God supposedly does it one more quote from David Bentley Hart he says to say that on the one hand God is infinitely good perfectly just and inexhaustibly loving and that on the other he has created a world under which terms as oblig him either to impose or to permit the imposition of Eternal misery on finite rational beings is simply to embrace a
complete contradiction the moral question is not an appeal to some mock sentimentality the character of God is at stake and therefore our honest presentation of the Christian faith the consuming fire is the fire of God's love as George McDonald says it is the power of love for God's creature it's about removing every obstacle to love not torturing people without end and sheer retribution and now the logical argument eternal hell is not even logical and I don't mean mere logic again theologic theology in Calvinism they say God can save everybody but he doesn't want to in
arminianism they say God wants to save everybody but he can't cuz it's up to you which is pelagianism salvation is not up to you that's Christianity 101 but universalism says God wants to save God can save and therefore God will save this is not a mystery it's straightforward logic theologic if he wants to the question is can he if he wants to and he can then will he and then of course we have the patristics we simply cannot run rough shot over how the historical church fathers and mothers viewed this issue in the first five
centuries and so we're going to take a couple of sessions of of unpacking this how did they see hell but again for me the biggest factor for me is the christological reality that through the exclusive historical incarnation of Mary's son 2,000 years ago a universal incarnation of the cosmos took place he is the restoration of all things in that sense I don't believe in the future reconciliation of the human race I believe it happened 2,000 years ago the only issue is how does this play out so my Baseline hermeneutic is not universalism as some metaphysical
necessity in its own right rather it's rooted in christology I wasn't trying to fit Jesus into a utopian Vision rather I found the only Vision that adequately fits Jesus that is befitting of Jesus must be infinitely bigger and better than our finite Minds can fathom that all of God's creation is made whole and so goes the famous line of Julian of norwi sin is inevitable but all shall be well all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well I'm coming to Reading California later this year it's my only event on the west
coast plus don't miss our Holy Spirit weekend on the Emerald Coast of Florida later this summer with Baxter Krueger Rod Williams and Warren Sylvester and I'll be in the midwest in Springfield Ohio in December also all of you new englanders need to come out for my only event in the region I'm coming to Massachusetts this fall plus my only European stops I'm going to be together with Baxter Krueger in Germany followed by a fun weekend in bosel Switzerland and finally plan to join us on the mission field bring in the party to the poorest of
the poor in the Philippines register for our Philippines Joy Mission by this October the trip is actually in 2025 you got time to plan come join us you can find all of these events and more by visiting John crow. events also check out our extended ecourses for a deeper dive into various topics such as intro to christology Sacred mystery a course on contemplation drunk church history walks through 30 hours of fun colorful stories to expand your understanding of the past plus there's our radically Grace oriented course on the Book of Revelation all of these are
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