​What is Love?

Today I would like to begin a new preaching series based on a Book by the Episcopal Bishop Michael Curry called “Love is the Way”.  The book is a really thought provoking exploration on the meaning of love and the potential for love to truly transform the world.  The first chapter begins in an obvious place as it asks the question “What is Love?”, “What is this thing called Love?”

In answering that question, Bishop Curry introduces us to a woman who made an enormous impact on his life, a women by the name of Josie Robbins. At the time of writing the book, Josie Robbins was still alive and in her 85th year.  The moment that precipitated Josie Robbins coming into his life was in fact the death of his own mother when he and his sister were still children.  She wasn’t a member of their church. She wasn’t even a family friend at the time.  She was just a lady who stopped by at his own church to drop off her neighbours child before going on to her own Baptist Church.  

But when she heard about their family situation and asked: ‘How can I help?’ soon thereafter, his father invited her into their home, leading her to the spare bedroom where a pile of clothes needed to be ironed.  A little later the same day he rang to say that he was running late at work and could she give his kids lunch?  And from that day, as she responded to further requests from his dad for help, Josie Robbins would eventually become a surrogate mother to him and his sister. 

He writes that “Moved by love, Josie  jumped in with both arms and never let go.”  She became the one who made the hurt go away as she did many of the things that their mother used to do for them. And over the years she was present at all their family events and big days – from high school, to university and to his seminary graduations, to weddings, ordinations, births and baptisms and on and on and on. 

For Michael Curry Josie Robbins became a living example of what love looks like, the kind of love that is the only way we can save the planet. 

Many languages have several words to encompass different kinds and dimensions of love.  Three of the most frequently used words in New Testament Greek are eros, philia and agape. Eros refers to romantic and sexual love and is what Valentines Day is about.  Philia is fraternal, brotherly or sisterly love. Also the bonds of love and affection experienced between friends.  

Finally, Agape is love for the other – a sacrificial love that seeks the good and well-being of others, of society and of the world.  Michael Curry writes that Agape is the kind of love that looks outward.  It is the kind of love that he experienced through Josie Robbins.  It is the kind of love that Jesus seemed to be most interested in. Love in this sense is the firm commitment to act for the well-being of someone other than yourself opening up the goodness and sweetness of life to them. And Michael Curry writes that it can be personal, or political, individual or communal, intimate or public. Love can never be segregated to the private or personal dimensions of life, but extends to and affects all aspects of life. 

What Michael Curry didn’t know as a child was that Josie Robbin’s love shared so generously with his own family had changed many other lives also. She was the principal of St Augustine’s school, a high school for pregnant and parenting teens.  In the 1960’s, while most of the rest of society were ready to disown and abandon pregnant teens, she poured her life energy into giving them a chance at a better future for themselves and their children, helping thousands of them to complete their high schooling with the opportunity to go on to study further or get a decent paying job.  

Michael Curry writes that an oft quoted passage in the New testament says, “God so loved the world that he gave his only son”. The Greek word for love used in the passage is agape, while the Greek word for ‘world’ is kosmos. But what it really means he says is “everything” – “everything that is”. Isn’t that wonderful…For God so loved the kosmos, God so loved everything that is, everything that God had created, that God gave… God did not take. God gave. As Michael Curry says: “That’s agape. That’s love. It is the way to a new world that looks something more like God’s dream for us and for all creation, what Dante spoke of as “the love that moves the sun and the stars”. 

Today’s reading is from 1 Cor 13, the apostle Paul’s inspiring ‘ode to love’. It is a passage that tragically is seldom read in churches except at weddings.  But as Michael Curry says, when the apostle Paul wrote those words he wasn’t at a wedding. He wasn’t giving advice to young couples on how to make their marriage work.  Paul’s words were in fact written for  a dysfunctional church community in Corinth in which its members had forgotten all of the values of Jesus of Nazareth that had first brought them together and they were in fact ripping themselves apart.  

They were a community splitting into factions according to who had baptised them. Members suing each other in the secular courts. Some were sleeping with other members spouses. The rich and well-to-do were demanding that they receive communion first and others getting drunk at communion. And in the midst of all of this a community arguing about who was more spiritual than who. 

Bishop Curry says it is behaviour that has a decidedly contemporary ring about it reflecting much of the of behaviour and attitudes expressed so often on social media platforms today: Arrogant, rude, insisting on its own way, irritable, resentful, rejoicing in wrong doing.  And so Paul reminds the Church in Corinth of the kind of love that they should be nurturing as a church community built around the values of Jesus – the only kind of love that can save a divided community. 

Bishop Curry writes that you might think that the opposite of love is hate. But if Love looks outward, to the good of the other, then it’s opposite is not hate. Rather it’s opposite is in fact selfishness. A life completely centred on the self. 

He goes on to say that intuitively, we all understand that nothing good ever came from selfishness and greed. In contrast to love, selfishness is the most destructive force in the cosmos and hate is only a symptom. Selfishness destroys families. It destroys communities. It destroys societies, nations and global communities, and he says, it will destroy the human race by laying waste to our planet it we let it. 

By contrast, he says that Love is the only thing that has ever changed the world for the better, seen in people who have dedicated themselves to the growth and flourishing of others, their communities and of the world.  This includes, parents and teachers dedicated to the flourishing of the children under their care. In fact it includes anyone and everyone who in their neighbourhoods, and places of work dedicate themselves to living not just for themselves, but for the greater good. People like Josie Robbins,  Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, William Wilberforce, the great abolitionist, Malala Yousafzai the activist for girls' education and the youngest Nobel Prize laureate, who survived an assassination attempt by the Taliban and continues to advocate for education and equality. 

As Michael Curry writes: Love is a firefighter running into a burning building, risking his or her life for someone he doesn’t even know. Love is that first responder hurtling toward an emergency, a catastrophe, a disaster. Love is also someone protesting anything that hurts or harms the children of God.  As Jesus says hours before his crucifixion in John’s Gospel: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s own life for one’s friends.”

Where selfishness excludes, love makes room and includes. Where selfishness puts down, love lifts up. Where selfishness hurts and harms, love helps and heals. Where selfishness enslaves, love sets free and liberates. 

And finally, Michael Curry says that Love is God’s GPS for living.  Getting back to Paul and the dysfunctional Christian community in Corinth, he concludes his exhortation to them to love with these words: “And now faith hope and love abide… and the greatest of these is love.”

Michael Curry writes that Faith is another word for trust. Without trust society falls apart. Every society depends on trust. Without trust, government is useless and relationships are impossible. Without trust it’s every human for him or herself – and that is just a mess he says. And so faith is a radical act of trust in reality. It is to dare to live and act as though the moral arc of the universe is long but bent towards justice, even if you can’t see its end.  Nothing short of faith can stay the course. It dares us to believe that in the end, even if we can’t see it, love will win. 

Then comes hope, which Michael Curry says puts wind in our sails of faith, for it is the energy that keeps us going when life gets tough. It was Dante who imagined the gates of hell with a signpost above it: “Abandon hope, all who enter here”.  Without hope Bishop Curry says that life becomes mere survival, but with hope he says you can march through hell for a heavenly cause. 

But while faith and hope are necessary for a full life, Bishop Curry says that they are not a guide for life. They don’t tell you what to do. That he says is the purpose of love. It is love that tells you how to direct the energy of faith and hope. He says that if faith and hope are the wind and the sails, then love is life’s rudder. It is God’s GPS or SatNav for the way of love will show us the right thing to do every single time.  He writes: “It is a moral and spiritual grounding – and a place of rest – amid the chaos that is often part of life. It’s how we stay decent in indecent times.” And although the way of love is not easy, he reminds us that it is the only thing that has ever made a positive difference in this world. 

What is love to you?  What are the places in your life where you are needing love’s care?  What are the places in your life where love is calling you to reach out beyond yourself to make a difference in the world? 

Today, as I have a Sunday off from preaching, I have prepared a brief online reflection based on three of the lectionary passages set for today.  The passages are:  

Psalm 23;   1 John 3:16-24;    John 10:11-18; 

In Psalm 23, we are invited into the imagery of the shepherd and his flock. The well-known and familiar imagery can get lost in our familiarity with them, but the Psalm remains rich with poetic imagery that can inspire us and plant seeds of hope within us for the Psalmist speaks to the fundamental human need and longing for guidance, protection, and sustenance. In the vast expanse of life's journey, we find comfort in the idea of a shepherd who leads us to green pastures and still waters, providing us with the nourishment and rest we need to thrive.  The imagery of the shepherd caring for his sheep in speaking to the universal longing for protection and nurturing I invites us to contemplate the possibility that there is a Higher Wisdom at work that we refer to with the word God, that seeks our highest good. It reminds us too of the importance of compassion and care for one another, regardless of our religious beliefs.

In the first letter of John verses 16-24, the themes of Psalm 23 are carried through as we encounter a powerful message about the nature of love. Love, as described here, is not merely a sentiment but a radical way of living. 

16 This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. 17 If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? 18 Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.

And so the passage suggests that Love is demonstrated through tangible acts of compassion, generosity, and solidarity with those in need. This love transcends religious boundaries and speaks to the universal longing for connection and belonging. As Non-Subscribing Christians, we embrace this call to love one another, recognizing that it is through our actions that we affirm our shared humanity and through our practical acts of love that we demonstrate our Christian commitment.

Lastly, in the Gospel according to John 10:11-18, Jesus presents himself as the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep. Vs 11 “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” It is a passage that carries a profound message of selflessness and sacrifice. The Good Shepherd is willing to put the needs of others before his own, demonstrating a deep sense of empathy and compassion. This is contrasted with the hired hand, who only looks after his own interests and runs away when trouble comes. In a world often marked by division and self-interest, this portrayal of leadership serves as a powerful reminder of the values we should hold dear as followers of Christ.

As we reflect on these passages, they are an invitation to recommit ourselves to embodying the spirit of compassion and love in our daily lives. May we be like the good shepherd who cares for his flock, extending a helping hand to those who are vulnerable or in need. May we practice a love that knows no boundaries, reaching out to our fellow human beings with empathy and understanding.  And may our actions reflect the deep-seated belief that we are all interconnected, bound together by our shared humanity and held by a Wisdom that is greater than our own. 
Amen. 

Judgement – Seeing Ourselves in the Light of Love

In around 1995 I was in the early stages of becoming a lay preacher.  I was just getting on my feet as a preacher after a wobbly start when I had thought a few times of just giving it up. 

On one particular Sunday I preached a sermon on a topic I can’t remember, but somewhere in the sermon I had made some kind of illustration by making a rather derogatory remark about time-share salesmen.  I don’t know how the timeshare industry is regulated or operated here, but in South Africa, the time-share industry had a reputation of creating contracts that were easy to sign but very difficult if not impossible to get out of.  

After the service one of the more senior members of the church came past to shake my hand at the door.  All he said to me was: Brian, I am a time share salesman.  To be quite honest, I don’t think he was a time-share salesman, but was putting himself in the shoes of a time-share salesman I order to make a point. 

And in that moment I suddenly realised what I had done.  It was for me a moment of searing pain in which I instantaneously recognised not only how sweeping and prejudiced a statement I had made from the pulpit, but the potential hurt and shame I may have caused for anyone in the congregation who was a time share salesman or perhaps had a family member who was one. I felt ashamed that the words had come out of my mouth so glibly without having considered what they could mean for some who were listening.   One could say that it was a moment of judgement. A very painful moment, that in fact lasted like a dreadful shadow for hours afterwards, and in fact probably for quite a number of days.   But it was also a moment of growth. One could say even a moment of salvation from that moment for myself and for anyone who would listen to my preaching from that moment onwards.  I would from that moment onwards be far more mindful of how  I spoke from the pulpit and hopefully never again make derisive, sweeping and prejudiced comments from the pulpit again. I hope I have never done so again. It is entirely possible that I have, because we all have blind-spots, things we are not fully aware of unless someone points them out to us. 

Today I would like to reflect on the concept of judgement.  What is judgement? What does judgement look like and feel like. In a way, this is an epilogue to the sermon series we have just completed. 

The idea of the Last Judgement is one that is deeply etched into our Western Psyche. Some of the greatest artworks of Western Civilization are depictions of the last judgement.  And I think especially of the scene of the Last Judgement painted by Michelangelo on the Altar Wall of the Sistine Chapel between 1536 and 1541. 

Interestingly, in Michelangelo’s depiction of the Last Judgement, almost all the human figures in the painting are depicted naked.   One might simply put that down to the fact that it is a renaissance painting in which it had become more and more common to depict the naked human form. But in doing so, it appears that he was actually trying to communicate something of the deeper meaning of judgement: The sense that the process or experience of judgement is an experience in which our ability to cover up is removed.  Judgement is the experience of no longer being able to hide ourselves from the light of truth, the truth of who we are and what we have done. 

One gets a sense of that in the Genesis story.  When Adam and Eve in the story disobey the Divine command, they feel exposed  and vulnerable and so try and cover up their nakedness by hiding in the garden and sewing together fig leaves.  It is a story that is true not because it happened, but because it happens to all of us. It conveys an archetypal truth. 

It is surely symbolic of our human tendency to become defensive in trying to cover over our flaws and faults.  None of us enjoy being criticized and having our faults and weaknesses identified, even when we know that the criticism might be true. In fact often it is when the criticism is true that we become the most defensive because we feel so vulnerable. We don’t like to be exposed and so we try to cover over our faults, because we don’t want others to see us as we really are. And more often because we don’t want to see ourselves as we really are.  We are afraid of the light, because in it we feel exposed and vulnerable. And so we prefer to hide our flaws and faults in the dark so that we can avoid looking at them in the hope that others won’t see them as well. 

And this brings us to our passage from John’s Gospel today in which the writer shares his perspective on what judgement is:  

John 3:19-20 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.  (And we should note that the Greek word for evil in this passage comes from the root Greek word ponos meaning hurtful. Our tendency to cause hurt and harm. It is not saying we are inherently evil.)

I wonder if that gives us a clue as to what the so-called final judgement is about:  Is it perhaps that the metaphor of the final judgement refers to that moment when the Light of Truth will shine upon us in such a way that we can no longer hide the truth of who we are and what we have done.  It is a searing and painful moment, because we don’t like what we see it and we especially don’t like others to see it as well.  The metaphor of the Last Judgement is the experience where we stand naked before God and we can no longer cover ourselves up. 

I think of someone like Vladimir Putin.  No-one likes to think of themselves as a bad person.  You can be almost certain that Vladimir Putin does not think of himself as a bad person.  In his mind he has a whole lot of stories to justify to himself and to other people why he is doing what he is doing. In his propaganda he constantly tries to show himself in the best light.  What will judgement look like for Putin? It will look exactly the same as it will be for each of us. It will be a moment or an experience of no longer being able to hide behind the stories that we tell ourselves, and having the truth about our actions exposed will surely be a most painful experience.  

But what we don’t realise is that the Light of Truth that illuminates our darkness and exposes it is also at the very same time the Light of Divine Love.  And while it might be painful to have the truth about ourselves revealed by Divine Light, it is also in that moment that we can begin to experience the embrace of divine love. 

What will the judgement and accountability look like? That is a question that is difficult to answer, because we are in the territory of things that are beyond our full comprehension.   But what I would suggest is that at the very least judgement and moral accountability when we stand naked before God will look something like my experience standing at the door of the church shaking hands.  At the very least the final judgement will be a lifting of the veil of the true nature of our crimes of commission and omission.  It will be seeing our acts of cruelty and indifference in the full light of love.  It will be a coming to know and to experience the full impact of our actions upon those whom we have hurt, abused or perhaps neglected.  And that seeing of ourselves and our actions unveiled completely before us will be an experience searing and inescapable pain for it is a dreadfully painful thing when we have nowhere left to hide and our deeds of darkness are exposed to ourselves and others.  But the good news will also be that this searing pain of having our deeds and misdeeds exposed by the Light of Divine Love will also be our healing and for our final salvation. 

When one thinks of these things in terms of victims and perpetrators, when a victim wishes pain on a perpetrator is it not that what they are really wanting is for the perpetrator to fully know and to fully understand and in some way to fully experience for themselves the full extent of the pain they have caused the victim.  And generally, where perpetrators have been able to bring themselves to the point of doing so with deep contrition, then a true and real reconciliation is able to happen between victim and perpetrator.   

Does that possibly give us a glimpse of what the final reconciliation of all things will be:  On the one hand, it will be the experience of the complete healing of the pain and wounds of the victim which will be mirrored and facilitated by the complete accountability and the complete contrition and healing of the perpetrator as well in which the perpetrators of this world will come to fully know and fully experience from the inside the true depth of pain inflicted upon their victims. And this process of healing of the perpetrator will not be without pain or without cost, but it will be full and it will be complete, just as the healing of the wounds and pain of the victim will also be full and complete aided by the fact that the perpetrator has fully understood and experienced in their own spirits the pain that he or she has caused.  

In Ephesians 5:13 we read: ‘But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes light.’

The exposing of our darkness might be a painful experience, but it is also the experience of our ultimate healing.  The Light of Divine Judgement turns out to be the Light of Divine Healing and Love because “...everything that is illuminated becomes light.” 

Questioning Eternal Hell (Part 6) - Free Will & Corrective Punishment

Over the weeks of Lent leading up to Easter, I had been inviting us to question the Doctrine of Eternal Hell. I had been using as my guide a book by David Bentley Hart trying to communicate the essence of some of the key points he makes. 

A question that we began to explore in the last sermon was:  Is there any justice? Where is the justice?  If the promise of Universal Salvation is true, that everyone, even the worst of humanity will in the end be saved by God’s all-redeeming Love expressed in Christ, is there still room for justice. 

We saw how David Bentley Hart believes that the New Testament writings point to two horizons: A penultimate horizon, ‘the end of the age’, in which all will be held accountable for our actions in this world, and a final horizon, ‘the age beyond all ages’ when having been purified of our darkness, we will all without exception be brought home to God. 

George MacDonald was a Scottish Congregational  Minister who lived in the 1800’s  (born in 1824 –  and died 1905).  He was the author also of quite a number of fictional stories. He had a very big impact on C.S. Lewis.  

Now George MacDonald was a Christian Universalist, in other words a believer in Universal Salvation, that in the end, all would be saved. But this did not mean that he had given up on the idea of some kind of judgement, accountability and even punishment in the after-life.  MacDonald's universalism was not the idea that everyone will automatically be saved, but is closer to the ancient view of the Christian theologian Gregory of Nyssa that all will ultimately repent (come to a change of heart and mind) and thus be restored to God. 

MacDonald grew up in a very severe Scottish Calvinist tradition and appears to have never felt comfortable with Calvinist doctrine, feeling that its principles were inherently "unfair". Apparently when the doctrine of predestination was first explained to him as a child, and that God had created some to be destined to eternal torment, he burst into tears. He could never accept the doctrine even though he was assured that he was one of the elect.

As Barbara Amall writes:  He was repeatedly quoted saying that when Protestants decided that three places in the afterlife were too many, [hell; purgatory; heaven] he believed that “they got rid of the wrong one.” He believed the early protestants should have got rid of the idea of Eternal Hell and rather should have retained something of the idea of purgatory.  It is not to say that his understanding of some kind of purgatory in the afterlife was an uncritical acceptance of the Catholic Doctrine of purgatory. He simply believed that some kind of purgatory, in other words a place or an experience of purification made far more sense of the over-arching Biblical framework and could at the same time preserve the foundational Christian teaching that God is Love, that God’s Love would be triumphant and that no-one would be finally excluded from God’s all encompassing, never-failing love.  For George MacDonald, the idea of an eternal hell of sufferings and torment turns God into a monster for whom eternal cruelty is the final word and not eternal love. 

And so in 1890, George MacDonald, while giving a series of lectures on Dante made the following statement:  “I do indeed believe in a place of punishment, but that longing and pain will bring us back to God.” He went on to say “There is a deep truth in the soul undergoing Purgatory [in other words, the sufferings of purification] in order that it may return to God—in whom we live and move—at all times.” 

From his "Unspoken Sermons: Series I, on Justice" MacDonald said that  "If our God is a consuming fire, what will he do but burn and burn until every evil thing is consumed, and creation is awakened pure and free from sin! The fires of hell are but the love of God." He went on to say in the same sermon that "God's fire is not an avenging wrath, but a refining and cleansing flame. He will purge from his creation all that mars its beauty and tarnishes its purity."

 In God's school, where men [people] are punished for their sins, there is no cruelty, only love. For God cannot be cruel, and he never punishes for vengeance; he only corrects for the sake of the wrongdoer…. Punishment is not vengeance, but a means of reclaiming the wrongdoer and restoring him to his true self."

It also needs to be remembered that where the New Testament refer to punishment, the Greek word that is used, kolasis, refers to corrective punishment and not vengeance. The word can be found in Matthew 25:46 at the end of the parable of the sheep and the goats, where the goats, or the ‘unrighteous’, who have not shown care and concern for the poor and the needy, are separated from the sheep and thus destined for what English translations call ‘eternal punishment’.  But here the Greek word is kolasis. And as Thomas Talbot writes in his book the Inescapable Love of God, kolasis was a common Greek word for remedial punishment or correction, and that the idea of an eternal correction, would be an event or process of limited duration whose corrective effect literally endures forever.  

And so for George MacDonald and many other Christian Universalists like him, all the metaphors of fire in the New Testament as we touched on in the last sermon, refer to the purging fire of Divine love burning away all that is false, unjust, unloving and wicked within us in order to reveal that golden essence within of that original true self or the image of God that God has placed with us that has been marred obscured and distorted, by our selfishness, injustice and lack of love.  George MacDonald believed that the purifying, purgatorial, love of God is in fact already experienced in this life whenever we are met with the painful consequences of our wayward actions. 

But there are also a few other metaphors as well in the New Testament, most especially in the Gospel of Matthew and one from the Gospel of Luke, metaphors of exclusion, like sealed wedding doors, accompanied by the gnashing of teeth. And one can think especially of the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus where because of the Rich Man’s failure to show compassion and human kindness to Lazarus in his destitution and poverty, he seems to be quarantined off in some experience of suffering and thirst in the afterlife.  But there is nothing in the parable to indicate that these sufferings of the Rich Man are in fact eternal. We should also be reminded of the fact that it is a parable, not a literal description. It is but one metaphor among many used in the New Testament.  

For George MacDonald, if the passages in the New Testament referring to some kind of exclusion and banishment from the Divine Presence are to be taken seriously and not simply dismissed, then the purpose of such exclusion is ultimately to awaken a deeper longing for God that would in the end bring that soul back home to God. 

I am reminded of the words of St Augustine: “O God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in you”.  The suggestion is that outside the embrace of Divine Love, there is no real happiness, only restlessness. And it is that restlessness and unhappiness that will eventually make all of us turn back to God where we can find our deepest happiness. 

There are a lot of people who suggest that eternal hell is the choice that some will make to remain eternally separated from God. This is the argument based on free-will. That God respects our free will so much that God will allow us to make the eternal choice to reject God. 

But David Bentley Hart says that such a choice in fact makes no sense. Because we have been made by Divine Love and for Divine Love, and that our true and deepest freedom can only be found within that Divine Love. To live outside of that Love will forever leave us unhappy, empty and unfulfilled. And it is precisely for that reason that David Bentley Hart suggests that we will all one day find our way back to God, no matter how far we have strayed or how lost and depraved we have become,  because as beings who in fact crave happiness and freedom, the desire for that happiness and freedom will eventually lead us back to the only place where that happiness and freedom can be satisfied, and that is in God. 

And so it could be said that God has created us with a homing device. You can only stray so far and for so long until it begins to chafe and a deep longing is ignited within us to return home. The idea that we can wonder off for all eternity and of our own free will reject God’s Infinite and Boundless Love doesn’t actually make sense, because it goes against the very nature of how we are made at our core.  The Divine Image within, what some might speak of as the Divine Spark within all, will eventually bring us all back home.  In this view, there is no-one who is dispensable in God’s eyes and there will in the end be no collateral damage in God’s plan to bring all things back to unity in the end.

“O God, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until we find our rest in you”.  St Augustine, interestingly was not a Universalist, but if he had pondered his own statement deeply enough, and truly understood the limitless nature of Divine love, he might have realised that one day, all sorry and miserable sinners would turn back to God. 

And so in the New Testament there are numerous passages, using a variety of images and metaphors that speak of judgement, consequences and remedial and corrective sufferings. None of those need to be dispensed within a Christian Universalist framework.  What David Bentley Hart suggests however is that while these passages do exist and need to be taken seriously and not simply dismissed, if we simply had the eyes to see them, the number of passages that consistently point to the final reconciliation of all things are in fact far more numerous. 

I hope this series has been stimulating for you.  I would have to concede that perhaps not all have been completely convinced by this series of 6 sermons.  There is only so much ground that can be covered in 6 short reflections. The gift of our Non-Subscribing tradition remains that all of us are encouraged to investigate these things for ourselves and come to our own conclusions.  If this series has peaked your interest there are a number of books that you can read further.  I will put references up on our website. 

David Bentley Harts book “That All Shall Be Saved” was not the easiest reading as he seems to be writing for people who have a masters or doctorate in theology.  But there are a number of other books that you could read: 

Rob Bell has a very readable book entitled: Love Wins which I would be happy to lend to you. 

I have another readable book by Kalen Fristad called Destined for Salvation. 

The most thorough book that I could probably recommend on the subject is by Thomas Talbot, called: The Inescapable Love of God. 

Thomas Talbott’s Book which is available on Kindle is perhaps one of the most thorough Biblical explorations of the subject.